To my potential:
I watched you build my first and only swing set. Stitch bolts like you were creating a dynasty. For a trapeze artist that dreamt only in diamonds. I saw you implement swings, so I could be closer to clouds. You embraced wooden planks, carved prayers into poems with your razor blade, and chiseled your offering onto a yellow lawn of a boy that loved talking to the sun.

You stained blackberry blood thimbles into the structure, pressed your creation down into the righteous earth, like turntables mixing childhood calamities

I camped on that dream.
Let my legs embrace freedom every day after school. Grease sucked lemonade stars, tickled me in the dark, bugs splattered themselves on my face like paint, aiming at my open mouth for disaster. I sucked the color out of the moon, engraved my bottom on the plastic slide. Its yellow slick tongue delivering me to the ground. Letting me come up for air and breathe dynamite. I was a gymnastic circus boy, leotard hands,, eclipsed by imperfection, and bright curls so tight it hurt to do anything but sing.

But you left, and it wouldn’t stop raining
And my expectations have scorched the centerfolds on my palms

Because I expected for you to be lovely.

For you to play with me, and draw out the nectar out of the days as if remembering that every day is a birth. Day.

I expected for you to call me an angel, steal my feathers at night and sell them in the black market, trade a piece of your son for the pills that made your eyes look less like raw wood under fingernails, rising the dead.
And that the smell of my hair would be your greatest medicine. And it would allow you to keep promises.

I expected for you not to ask me to have a structure be my father.

But you built that swing set to destroy my potential, and hope that he would shield me from your neglect. And like all great gods I must create myself again.

And ask that you know better that to make a child wait. (When you knew you would never come.) In his favorite red shirt. On his birthday. To go to the carnival. Maybe that’s why I eat cotton candy every chance I get, so that I can make up for the opportunity of never having it with you.

... beautiful.. ! kudos.. !!

thank you

thank you i get the sentiment

Wow!