And You Weren't There To Listen. . .

Summer that year was sweltering.
My form in rebellion contained
a miracle of alchemy that sent me
rushing every few hours to worship
with vice grip fingers smooth white
idolotry in the body's rapturous
chorus of protest against chemical
invasion. And you were not there
to hold my hair or listen.
But he listened to me as I spoke
about shaped light and Shakespeare,
drowsy turning in his dreams of my
heart beat and your voice absent to
add the baritone in the sonnata that
is the beginning of self, of life,
of concious choice to be.
You were not there to listen as I
sat two in the morning singing
in the dark missing my lover's touch;
troubled mind and troubled heart.
But he listened as I sang nightengale
sad and solitary to soothe his violent
beginnings as I recounted the litany
of things I would never say about you.
No, you were sleeping next to her and
her and pretending that we did not
exist because it was much easier
than watching me fall apart as my
life unravelled and all I had worked
for and known became a tick tock
time bomb mess whose final explosion
would take the last of who I was.
And you weren't there to listen
as I talked to my family and tried
so hard not to make you a monster
but to help them understand you
were a boy like this one who had
no more training than I did
about how to love when you did not.
After all, who ever asks for today
to become a terrorist cocktail that
waylays familiar, ties you up to whisper
that your life will end just when
they want it to end. So I prayed
to whatever God from my youth would
listen. Prayed for understanding
and for you to reach inside your soul
to return to me and hold my hand.
I prayed for this child to know you;
if only enough to never feel unwanted.
Summer swelter turned to Autumnal
crisp red and gold and I was left
still to speak in the dark and you
were not there to listen.
Winter in the deadlands when hope
is gone from the world you came
and I thought that this was at last
a prayer answered. But no prayer,
no wish, no silent hope is ever
answered without a condition.
You returned, but not to listen.
The night he was born, my body
barren of its best company, you
sat edge of the bed hands
clinched without touching me
as I cried for all the lonely months
lost without this child always near.
You looked at me the way you always do;
without understanding. You watched
my sorrow like it was a television screen
and I felt again that absence of forever.
You slept that night on a bed that wasn't
and I whispered in the dark the truth
to hear it: you would never love me.
And you weren't there to listen.
But he did.