I do not know your age,
Or rather, what your age would be
And all that now to me would mean,
If you were here, alive somehow.
Seventy-four, or seventy-three;
Some people once remarked
That you looked a lot like me.
You neglected every milestone
Beyond your event horizon’s beak
At world’s edge;
Never seen a sunset,
Just an endless bleak and
Ghastly eyeless glass waterfall,
Like a flea-infested mere black hole,
Full of gassy gravity
And its own invested energy.
I disowned you years ago,
Of course, and consequence;
(I thought you should know);
The silences, interruptions
In faith and the quiet
Self-confidence
Derived from permanence,
The planets in their place
Are no more than dusty molecules.
Actions resonate, in blood,
In deoxyribonucleic bonds.
So much is invisible
To the naked eye,
Wouldn’t you say.
Your grandchildren,
Beautiful in their individual
Ignorances and unwrongs
Of your divestment
And your imposition undoing
Of scriptures, and your dance
With Fate, and behemoths
Devoid of any talent, yet
Too great for you
To contemplate too long;
They sing a new psalm
Cut from a brand new song;
Every birthday, yes,
Every marriage,
Every great-grandchild
In Life’s Great Carriage
You deprived yourself of,
Every candle blown out,
Every significant moment
Like neonatal visits
And yellow blankets knitted,
Like a despot overthrown
By populist senses of goodness;
And graduation mortar boards,
And then the inbetween minutes
And hours of simplistic wonder,
Blissfully ponder,
A trip to the beach,
A vanilla ice cream,
Pretence of a wizard,
A long Christmas list
And bedecked Christmas Tree.
Dreams of a gizzard
Are all that are left,
Dreams out of reach
For the deeply bereft.
Never a grandfather,
Never would die
In a world you created
Where mistruth resides
You outlive, outsurvive;
Never a grandfather,
Only a Dad,
Only Death’s Bride,
Only a Dad.
