It isn’t like I’ve not forgiven
my father, the brutish man
who cared so much about
what people thought.
The memories of the motes
of dust settling on me
while I whimpered, facing
the door length mirror,
my mother struggling to fend
him off are now whispers,
muted sounds that hum
when I’m sleeping, forgotten
with the light.
It’s what he’s become
that appalls me, the scalding
self-pity, as incandescent as rage,
an anger we knew so well,
a hatred that became his bedfellow,
his confidant, his comrade,
now mellow like a sickly simulacrum
of Autumn,
a poor impressionist painting.
“I’ve always loved you,” he says,
a choke betraying deep self-love,
a perennial leaning on the pillars
of a bruised ego.
“I’m sorry,” he says,
and then, “75, and a life
spent doing nothing.”
There!
The shift to self,
the plea for attention,
the histrionic cry for affirmation,
for a touch that says,
“Go! All your sins
are forgotten.
Wait! You never sinned!”
The need for justification,
not the Lord’s
but fellow man’s.
They know who he is
now, and that tortures him,
roasts him in a Sicilian Bull,
and the way out is a
pleading, anguished,
“I’m not well!”
when a common cold
gives him a stuffy
nose, a maddening, paranoid,
“I can’t do that. It’s dangerous
to send messages
on WhatsApp,” or
an outright denial
of insanity,
even after 2 breakdowns.
“Those medicines
will interfere with
my diabetic drugs!
You can’t expect me
to take them. I’m old,”
after scarring two
lives with
indelible tattoos of abuse,
ugly marks of tribal rage.
The cacophony
now a self-loathing sonata,
pleasing to those
who don’t know the truth,
the discordant, atonal,
smash-the-door-and-
slap-you metal now smooth jazz,
but not smooth enough
for the keen listener.
Ordinary Person 
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