Your father is still your father. Love him and forgive him as a young child.
The way you were in expectant, resolute delight of his arms around you.
Your father is still your father in his audacious crime of falling in love.
I, his Pygmalion’s statue, his muse, his mistress, his little goth whore,
you see me as nothing better than shit on your kitchen floor
before gathering round the dinner table to hate him a little more
for his Byronic hedonism, blaspheming beyond acceptance and norm.

What about your mother? Yes, I do have sympathy alongside my solitary tea.
I wonder how monogamy has served all these years and now it seems
all the tears have replaced all the fears as I unearthed parts of him
that had been long buried for years. Re-cornered to commit, we then quit
in the face of the screen of working class pseudo-Christian morality.
Injured wife plays out a scene that could well be from Coronation Street on TV.

He may be banished from me, but you cannot see into his mind’s reality.
I am still breathing with him every minute of the day. Go on, carry on,
make him what you want him to be, paying your rent and university tuition fees.
You think you are liberal, anti-establishment yet you keep him institutionalised
to feed your selfish needs. You writhe and rebel in flippant devastation
an austere reaction to the truth that he was not happy in what his life is.

I fluttered a hurricane into his dull unrealisation, brought him a unique colour
that blinded him so bright despite all the social conditioning and
marital expectations of his generation, not mine.  It is not who we are
but what we give to each other in life. I gave him sanctuary and time,
talked him up and down in clandestine finery, embracing his fears of losing
his children with blind faith that their love would not be shaken. I was mistaken.

Now alone, I teach my children that we need many loves to help us grow
and swans are an ideal elysium, not an expectation.  He still loves me
and I still love him, silently alongside victorian romantic stories of frustration
where all kinds of family, duty, obligation, and vanity win the game
against true happiness. You are still young, and freedom will fly from you too.
Love him, forgive him and when you next look in your father’ eyes,
look for the fire asphixed in his soul - that has now died.

© Katypoetess 2013