My hands are shaking
so bad I almost drop
the letter they're holding
and I haven't even opened the envelope yet.

My heart is racing
so fast as my mind can't stop
replaying our five years
together repeating
its events every five seconds.

It's been a decade
since I saw your handwriting --
a signature on a black line on crisp white paper
giving up your boy
-- or long before that,
a love note that said you'd never leave.
But you left
every time you got drunk or high;
You left
long before we ever packed a thing.
You took trips so far away from us,
into depths you knew we couldn't follow.
You left
us there to watch your decline, to suffer
the consequences of your choices until
we left
for good.
And it was for the greater good, I know...
as long as it's true
that having no father is better
than having a bad one,
As long as it's true
that having loved and lost is better
than never trying.

But after you,
it's hard to have confidence in myself
with recognizing what's true.
After all, I thought you were
true
once.

And I know it doesn't matter anyway
because you made all the choices
of my life for me.
You decided I'd go to college
when you blew Friday's paychecks at strip clubs and street corners.
You decided I'd move away
when you promised to choke out every last breath and take away my heart.
You decided I would never trust
when you destroyed the belief that reward is sometimes worth risk.
You decided that I'd write this poem
when you first looked at me before I even knew your name.

And now this.
An envelope, my name in your handwriting
(and I remember what those hands did to us,
the chaos they caused,
the protection they were supposed to give,
the pain that rained down from them).
Now this.
An envelope, your name is followed by an inmate number
and a red-inked stamp that reads
"sent from a state correctional institution."

Ten years
you've had to straighten out your life.
Ten years
I'd hoped you had turned it all around.

I should have pretended this letter never came.

But I can't,
just like I have tried to pretend the past evils didn't happen,
but memory won't betray the mind it's connected to.

So I open the envelope, praying for a sign of change
only to find all the same
"I'm sorries" as generic as the thousand
that came before.
I still want to believe it's real
this time.
I want to put some faith in the words before me
this time.

But I can't,
because my scars take the shape of letters
and those letters form
words carved into grey matter,
stained-glass blood, and stoney flesh,
all the words
created from your ghost.
These new words, though pretty and tempting, don't change the fact
that the old ones still haunt the hollow spaces
in my chest, and
the miles of veins traveled by them.

You're ready now, you say,
to be a man.
Our son beat you to it when he was three,
the day he wiped my tears born of your wrath and said
that he
would take care of me
after you taught him to see you as the enemy.
And now he is becoming a man you created
by both your presence and your absence.
A father's lessons are learned
either way.

You decided that he'd be angry
and afraid DNA dictates that he may become like you.
You decided that he'd build walls
around his heart so high that I don't know if anyone can breach them.
You decided that he'd think of you
and want to weep over the loss of things once possible.

And now this.
You want to be friends.
You want to fix everything broken.
You want to make it all right in the world.
But you can't
have what you want
this time.
Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds, but at least
you don't make the decisions anymore.
Not for us.

And this envelope
carrying the essence of you
just lost all its power,
so
self respect and empowerment,
happiness and peace,
success and strength
are all ours for the taking
with three little words of our own:
return to sender.

05/07/2008

Posted on 05/07/2008
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