One of the few things I know about your father is that he hates me or
at the very least he's ****** sure I'm the one who, you know, pushed
the situation that we were living into the mess and the chaos and the
scream of sirens and phone call cries and late night drives through
perilous raining passes and hospital sheets and threats and breakdowns
that something once like love finally warped and quickly became.

There's no real problem with any of that except for the fact that now
it's so many months on and we both know we're still living the lives
we were, only now extended and separate and lonely but more close
than ever, over the North/South distance we created to say, Hey, we
don't ******* need each other and what we left we're leaving because
the reality of the ecstatic sort of good times fever dreams we dreamed
was that we woke up every morning feeling worse than the last,
running our engine and spinning our hamster wheels and talking
talking talking about things we'd do, but never paced ourselves enough
to spill our brains and hearts and our souls out of our bodies through
our capable hands, instead filling the gaps with more gaps and chasms.

Too much green grass to adequately water the land that matters means
that over the great expanse of minutes and hours and days we fall
behind without the energy or the means to cover enough ground and
give water to the buds we love, ******* buds into our lungs more
often than in the beginning to hide the fact that we bought a farm
from the start and never, ever, ever, once ******* thought to buy
a riding lawn mower or the seeds to sow in hopes of furtive futures.

I've been spending so much time falling apart, over and over in
what I thought might be the eerie and pitifully pathetic beginning
of an endless staircase that I tripped down the moment I told you
I'd never talk to you again and cut you out of my life in a fit of
anger and blind eyed tunnel vision that strikes, snap, lightning
fast from the terrible, less kissed and uncontrolled side of intro
version, intuition, feeling and perception, only to find myself here
in a melting meadow of ice and slush and feeble gray sunlight
through slate clouds as if we've seen the dead of Winter and stand
dumbfounded in boots and wet wool socks in the aftermath with
our mouths gaping in the face of the fact that we're painfully
breathing ice cold breaths that are slowly growing warmer, like
two lost kids buried years in sand to our necks, thinking the
possibility of dual meaning coin in our coffers like a dream.

We talked.

We have things to say, maybe, but we don't say them, because
in the light of a quiet, hopeful dawn we both learn that your
father's dying at the exact same time while we play with fire,
Catholic youth in public high school sneaking into each others'
bedrooms without condoms to do the things we want to do
without thinking about the consequences that fate's lining up
and laughing as every punishment falls into place like the last
time we ******* tried just crumbled into God ****** pieces
of glass from our oft mocked frame and bones of stone and
blew away in the Summer's wind, but we expect the Winter
is as over as the seasons are attempting to tell us.

We know that all pass.

Dad pass well, please.