Aw, Mom
What can I say?
What can I do that would justify
My behavior to you?
I’m just runnin’ in Daddy’s steps
Dark passion and rigid adherence
To rules of propriety and proper deportment
This is the way
I know it, I walk it
In social circles I talk it
The right way masks my dark obsessions
Those black proclivities
My indulgences
Matching step for step
The trails that Daddy trod

You don’t know
Could not accept
The paths he trod in his dark days
Of aimless youth
His pursuit of gonad directions
The frivolous fruit
Daddy’s compulsion
His hot pursuit
Is mine, is mine, is mine
I know him now
Better than I ever did
We have morning coffee conversations
Over eternity and survival
And belief in the cult of “One”
So now, more than ever, I am Daddy’s son
Step for spoor for trail to track
I walk the path from so far back
That I can feel his father’s rejection
A seventeen-year-old’s perplexity
Over what to do
Where to go
Who to trust the way to show

I watched him
While chain smoking Marlboro reds
He crying, rolling on the bed
I was seventeen

Still pristine
Still grasping, gulping, taking all I saw
As mine to be
This world existed for my pleasure
Yet, Daddy cried and howled and convulsed
“Don’t leave me alone,” he begged
I was empty, impotent
Unable to encourage
The icon that could turn my bowels to water
With a disapproving word
“Don’t leave me”
While I had nothing to give
But smoky, 8% tar and nicotine exhalations
You expect me to know or understand
When all I can think about is getting high
Or getting laid
Popping my school-boy cherry?

Aw, Mom
I have the same addiction
The same desire for acceptance and recognition
The same uncertainty
The same intimidation
“I will bury you with a soup spoon”
My exploits are greatness
Like Beowulf or Alexander
My legacy is the steel of soldiers
Who shed their fear and doubt
Who lock and load
And scream defiantly in the face of destruction
Then retreat to the bottle or the needle or the spliff
Or the bottle recedes to the news bite
6 o’ clock monotone
Take your ease, America
For your safety is ensured

Mom, this was Dad’s path
I walk it yet
I can only hope to fill
Those footsteps
With half the weight he carried
I follow his trail
Experience for myself his travail

For I am weak as
Strong as

Full of ideals as
Loving you as
Hoping I can trip by
The grand inquisition as
He tried to be the best as
True as
No patience for the fool as
Cantankerous as
Don’t fuck with him
By driving slow in the fast lane as
He could be

Honest to the end

Mom, I can only aspire to be half as good as that
Walking in my Daddy’s steps

© 2008