hey dad, been a while since we had a heart to heart, the hot trails down my cheeks are your disappointment in the place you have to watch me sit in

wallowing in my depression like a pig in mud unknowing that the farmer comes and he has no more slop

just a gun

I miss you, wish you could hear the words I shout to you in whatever afterlife you found yourself in

wish you could come to me and tell me it is going to be okay like you did when I had a nightmare and ran to your room as kid, but not like you did after I had a repeat dream because those meant nothing to you the second time around 

remember when I was five and I had that dream I was on the table and was about to witness my own autopsy but I didn’t have the words to describe it I just knew I was dead and you held me as I sobbed

you were always my hero, but you never knew it, you always drowned the real world in amber fluids and kept the inside inside even as I paraded around the neighborhood with my heart exposed

you stood tall and silent but with an easy smile that i know now hid your pain, you showed me how to put a mask on and how to pretend

I think you knew what I was going through but you could never say the words to me, just sent me in for a pack of cigarettes and 12 pack, that was your medicine even as it killed you it kept you whole, kept you from falling apart

I am falling apart, leaving a trail behind me as I shuffle down the street, organs and discarded pieces of self drifting like a goddamned bag until finally finding a place on the grill of a car or wrapped around an axle

I talk to you all the time when things go bad which is all the time and that is when I talk to you

I talk to you and tell you about the kids who never got to hug you and believe that I was fucking hatched from an egg and no matter how many times I tell them about you I might as well be describing a unicorn 

you became my unicorn you rotten son of a bitch, you became my goal my dream my everything because I realized I have and am nothing and I can trace it back to the day you came down with cancer

I love you and if I could trade a year of my life for fifteen more minutes with you I would set up enough time to have an eight course meal and you could call me Cow and I would know it was all going to be okay

I would know these chains around my neck are figments of an over active imagination and crippling self doubt

maybe I could have been something more than a pile of broken bits and sarcastic responses

I could have, right dad? I have the potential inside, right dad? I made you proud of me, right dad? I was the son you wanted me to be not the one that came first and made you have to choose to get rid of your daughter for, right dad?

right dad?

I wasn’t just loud and different, I fit in somewhere. I wasn’t the one that the words drunkenly screamed formed, not the one that was not as important as a trip to the bar after work

you got off at 430 and I would sit on the rock and watch traffic waiting for you  some days I fell asleep on that fucking thing as you tied one on

fuck you dad, fuck you fuck you fuck you for leaving me to handle this world without a net

fuck you for being more than I ever will, fuck you I love you I miss you I need you fuck you

fuck me, right? these tears just hurt and this is nothing more than a child screaming because the world is not fair

the kids are great, you would have never let them go from your giant hugs. I try. I squeeze every ounce of love into them, one for me one for you

did I ever tell you how I held the box with your ashes and wept for an hour as if the rain of my sorrow could somehow make you whole again that I could sculpt you and bring you back to life

did I mention how I never got past your death and instead let the the darkness drive everything I held dear away

I did but you didn’t fucking hear because you left

I miss you dad, so much. you became another corpse on the highway of my life, part of a hundred car pile up that Google doesn’t know how to navigate, another lock on the door to enlightenment that I will never be able to open

I have three ladies in my life now dad. one that loves another, one that looks for reasons to hate me and one that seems to think i am okay. spoiler alert, I am not what any of them needs

I like to imagine you never felt that way about me. but i know you did. everyone does. fuck.

I miss you