a man to match,
two husbands for mother and me,
two pennies shined and spent,
irrelevancy captured in pastiche
be not my father, fleeting, fugacious,
a filament of generational morals
or rather something less gracious.
I burn for my sins, sitting on your pyre
was my death cathartic enough, my child?
did you really have to call me a liar?
I cried for my matrimony,
nineteen and a child already lost,
supposed residual bonding upon this acrimony
can you tell me,
what couldn’t I see?

Beneath those hands
that were once so quick to strike
you hide eyes that shed tears in the light
but remain quietly dry in the darkness.
the audience, with that sad soliloquy, is sedated
but I remain a victim resigned backstage
a witness to all this from an angle much less complicated.
as supporting cast, I played my part,
myself reduced so you could be elevated
though you “died” you lived on in my heart
for the life you were to me was all I had known
until finally those curtains began to close
and I recognized that I was grown.
How could you see, from up high on that stage,
anything that you didn’t want to be shown?