This is what I do

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

My father never drank,
But in my fiction he does.
He stumbles in and out of scenes,
Dumb, violent, in pain.
My adult fingers grant my friends courage
And they laugh at him–
Brave
Disrespectful 
Things. 
I wish they could see themselves.

In my stories I watch Dad 
From a distance,
From a tree,
From the inside of a well.
He watches me, too,
Through eyes that are almost shut, 
Always heavy.

Inside my figurative language
I am 
Blurry,
Incomplete, 
smudged.

In one story he doesn’t recognize me,
Thinks I’m another drunk,
Tells me he has a child he loves,
A child with whom
He wants to play something
Gentle,
Before I make him trip on 
Untied shoelaces
And he bleeds on dirt.

Most of the time
He doesn't speak,
Doesn’t sing,
Dances only once, 
Right before I take his wife
From him.

I know now that I have filled
Him to the brim with 
my assumptions,
my desires to punish him.

I have tried to not write him in,
To erase him from that world,
So I wrote about that kid who lost three toes to a train,
And the rest of us, my brave friends,
Searched for the one toe no one else could find
Until we found it being carried away by ants.
Dad had no place in that tale but
In my final draft I found him
Slumping on the train tracks,
The train imperceptible except to
An ear pressed against cold steel.

I’ve tried to kill him,
Almost drowned him once.
Got him so drunk he fell face first
Onto sand so wet it sucked his face in.
I watched him,
From a distance,
And I gave the ocean fingers with
Which to rescue him.

He will die soon
In that faraway land,
And I will cry,
For sure,
And say some dumb shit like, 
“I wish it had been like this and 
I wish it had been like that”
And I will write the best fiction.