You wake up every morning thinking
you have all the answers until they
call you to tell you your dad’s in the hospital
dying of cancer and it’s like an ACME anvil
falling on your head with the cartoon sound
effect included and you’re all quietly WTF 
at yourself at how it drowns out the voice
on the phone and the voice in your head and you
count six five-pointed stars spinning around your head
as you fight the realization that you actually give a shit
when you’ve spent every second of the last
13 years of your adult life telling yourself
that you don’t and that you never have,
turning your anger into ritual and dogma,
turning denial into a daily mantra,
I fucking hate him. I hate him. I fucking I hate him.
And breathe…
And now you breathe it all in,
You breathe him all in when you visit his grave,
your lungs filling with his ghost,
your blood filling with his memory,
your flesh filling with his absence and
his voice over the phone across all
those years you didn’t give a shit,
still lying, telling you he’s fine, mustering
all of his effort to hide that he’s drunk, but
you can hear the decay through the
phone speaker so clearly it’s as
if he’s right next to you and now you’ve
traveled 300 miles to be right next to him
and every answer you thought you had has
turned into a question and question after
question comes at you every day like
tiny anvils flying at you from your own skin
and then, ah, it hits you as you steel yourself
against the incoming volley,
here you are at the start of your life.