Father’s Day

It’s not her fault,
lying there, on her front,
in the sun, looking back
at me and asking,
as I leave,
how long am I to be?
- so peremptorily,
that I feel she’s judging me again
as another of those wicked men.

I’d just decided not to phone you,
and, therefore, not to say
my wound had burst once more,
and that, within my inner world,
there raged another furious war.
‘Please, help me not to lash myself
until I am a writhing mass of flesh,
and almost dead,’
I also had not said.

Then my son had rung,
wanting to see me -
me the reviled, the rejected,
the renegade.
So often when he rings,
I feel like this.

I’d put down the phone
and been in tears.
Why couldn’t my nascent sexuality
have been welcomed,
instead of prodded with fear,
as if it needed extirpating?
For this is surely what has banished it
to languish in so total a disgrace
in such a dark and fetid place.

But it’s not to blame this either,
though it’s a struggle:
for, first, I want to blame;
then have to pull back
to feel the pain,

as now I do,
slamming the front door,
in another surge of tears,
for this lost, rejected part of me.

Then that door inside shuts,
echoing the one I have just slammed,
and locking me away again for what,
I know will seem like years.

~ by bod1952 on November 1, 2008.