We poets

As a young boy, I looked up.
Up to this towering man that I wanted to be just like.
With bulging muscles and an expansive vocabulary of macho-induced lingo such as:
crescent wrench, car jack, oil filters, sinkers and bobbers, and Budlight.
Keeping up was a fight.
A fight to remember which a Phillips head was and which was the other.
On more than one occasion, even bringing him an Allen wrench by mistake.
I had to soak in the let down face of my father with every wrong tool that I brought.
Each. And every.Damn. Time.
I could not be taught.
Was he taking this as a sign?
My lack of interest in fishing and boxing.
Eventually, to stop asking for my help in the garage and instead seeking out my younger brother.
Always hearing of fishing stories where I had been uninvited.
I didn’t miss the grease, but then again, I wasn’t in it for that
I helped him with childlike enthusiasm, because I loved the bonding.
The bonding of father and son, not so much the bonding of metals by the welder’s spark.
No, I did not care about welding.
I preferred other things:
poetry, role playing and storytelling, dragons, and dancing in the park

We were strangers who knew each other very well.

I knew he could tell.
I didn’t know if by my god damned high pitched voice that I’ve always fucking loathed,
or simply by the way I carried myself.
I don’t know.
I only knew he knew, just as much as I knew he ignored it like an elephant in the room.
Dad was always good at ignoring elephants.

Despite his history of ass kicking in boxing and being able to lift hundreds of pounds of iron in our basement,
I’d never seen my father as strong as when I found his stash.
No, not his stash of pornography; this stash was hidden even deeper than that.
Just like the man of steel to hide his heart--his kryptonite--even more carefully than his Playboy.
As a curious, young man, I caught myself reading the latest edition of Jugs Magazine while dad was at work.
While pulling out Miss December, I found another box, hidden behind his stack of naked women.
Deeper in his shed of secrecy and tits--poetry.
Poetry written in my father’s very own hand.
I could barely stand.
Sonnets and coupling sets poured out front of me like a buried treasure.
For once, it wasn’t socket sets.
The pain and love, like a memoir telling the stories of his life that I had never known.
Because he had never shown.
I’d always wondered.
Wondered why we shared the same genes, yet dad and I were nowhere near the same shade of color
Not cut from the same cloth.
His black and blue, and mine purple.

Was I the mailman’s child?
That man always was light on his feet as he pranced up the steps to put mom’s Doral coupons in the mailbox
Dad and I didn’t share a name.

He eventually stopped bringing me to work with him.
I was easily hidden and I had to hear stories about his friend’s son’s boyish antics,
fully aware dad wished more of me.

We were like strangers who knew each other very well

But these letters and poems revealed so much.
For once, I saw some of dad in myself.
I knew I wasn’t the mailman’s kid.
For once, like everyone else around me, I understood how strong my father really was.

Like anyone else, we’ve had our moments though.
Of human hostility and carnage, forgetting we are all leaves in a family tree of one.
Being called a faggot through a screen is an example,
after being shunned,
after being told I wasn’t a  son of his.
All because I told him that I liked boys just as much as I liked girls.

We were like strangers who knew each other very well

There was also the time-- two months later-- when he asked to speak to me in the cab of his truck.
Which I’ve always considered to be his fortress of solitude, because for as long as I can remember,
two things were as equivalently true as Newton’s laws of motion:
a.)Dad always owned a truck
And b.) Any serious conversation dad wanted to have would be held within the confines of said truck.
And as a side note:
Driving down Sunset Avenue, listening to Kenny Chesney while dad awkwardly talks about birds and bees isn’t very fun.

It had been months of silence though.
Of quietness.
No show of talking, of speaking.
I had been a bastard and he’d been one son less.
I would have--
I would have told him to take his crescent wrenches and  to fuck off, but
…he was crying.
Dad doesn’t cry. Ever.
I cry, not dad.
So, I slid onto the cracked leather seat of his ’97 and waited for him to find words,
while I tried to hold mine back.
Words of anger, ready to burst from me like an ocean of water prying its way through a crack in a ship’s hull.
What came was even more shocking than the tears.
They were fears, fears about us.
He was open.
Open like the pages of poetry and hidden letters he wrote to himself that I accidently discovered  as a child.
Not hiding behind black ink and cursive writing for once.
He apologized. My father apologized.
He doesn’t do that. I do that.
He threw out apologies for everything:
the names and the ignorance; the ways of treating me differently from the rest;
of being the bird pushed from the nest.
Dad doesn’t apologize.
In fact, when I would bring up our distance and the unfairness, he would just call me a cry baby and laugh.
Now he was sorry?  

We were like strangers who knew each other very well

There was also the time, when he was the first person to rush into the cold, sterile emergency room.
Where everything in sight was white and I wanted to be bothered by no one because I had failed yet again.
Like how I never hit the t in little league, or was given pins in Boy Scouts out of pity.
I had been asked enough questions by nurses with melancholy personalities, who had worked 16 hour shifts and their feet were hurting, and the social workers who had the power to swing an axe on my already fractured remains.
However, I forgot I wanted no company when he rushed in, crying like no man on Earth has ever witnessed and came over to my hospital bed for a hug, unable to speak through tears.
I immediately was awakened in confusion after the treatments for swallowing my depression with thirty-two pills, chased by a chug of straight vodka. I was 17.
I am 20 now.
These are the bittersweet moments with my father.
These moments, I will remember.
The manly legend of testosterone fueled fighting awesomeness and hunting aim like no other,
but the strongest I’ve ever witnessed him, was when he fell loose like pages of a book with a broken spine.
The moments where he took off the suit of armor and showed the human inside
We are like damned strangers who know each other very well,
But we damaged poets try harder.
Harder to understand and see what lies within each other's inherited blue eyes.