On the day of all souls in the fall
as leaves lose luster to winter’s bane
my father’s shade returns to call
while I walk along a splintered lane:

His memory murmurs in a darkened nook
of years of yearning and wasted days,
as the distance that filled up the book
of our lives still grows as I turn to grey.

The care he’d showed I did not feel
as the pillars of our bridge began to crack.
Too late, I turned back to heal
the fallen span that we now lacked.

By then his old mind’s lantern had failed;
the new light I’d shone back went unseen
and broken arches into a chasm trailed
where once a golden bridge had briefly been.

Across the valley, dark, deep, and wide,
a spectral stretch of stones appears
to shine as a silvery coach now rides
across, to bring two sundered shadows near.

Now on this day of all souls missed
by those who find themselves left behind,
one faithful departed returns to kiss
the forehead of a son’s reopened mind.

I try to pinpoint when my childlike rage started, but it never started. It was passed through my blood, out of the womb. my mother and father gave me this poison, fire in my blood, that is slowly burning me from the inside out.

My eyes are like my fathers,
So is my heart,
No matter how much I try to undo myself,
or pick me apart,
He is a piece of me,
My bitter half.

Did you really have to change,
the moment I turned 11?

How the days we'd spend together,
suddenly turned into trying
to ignore each other
and screaming in the kitchen?

Maybe one day,
you'd see what I feel
and what I tried to convey.

How I drowned in my own thoughts
as a mere child,
while you were busy
fighting with mom,
or scrolling on the endless feed
your phone provides,
which hopes you rot.

I guess it wasn't for me to speak,
to tell you what it really meant
to raise someone,
or how to love properly.

But could I really blame you,
if that was all you'd seen as a kid?
passing on the poison given to you
that deepened the scars,
causing your unhealed wounds to bleed out,
while you knew nothing on what to do with it.

I didn't wish for anything grand
or the materialistic things
you ask me to be grateful for
I just needed you to understand.

To listen to me talk
about my day,
or ask me why I was upset
instead of yelling at me
to stop looking so annoyed and grey,
every waking moment.

You always make a point
to ask me why I changed,
from the sweet little girl you knew,
to whatever I've become now.
perhaps, did you ever stop to think--
why?

if you don't want a child
to grow up,
and become someone
what reason is there to raise it at all?

I suppose,
at one point in life
I'll learn to forgive you.

But all that comfort I yearned
and still do most of the time,
has yet to be returned.

It waits in the silent, dark place
between your anger and mine.

well, Dad,
did you really have to change?