If you never have anything
you don’t know what there was to lose…

my children know, though
they do as they most surely knew

love and warm dinners and cracked smiles
and laughter as long as the days grown wild

these things have gone missing
in their wholes still there in their parts
my parts, their father’s.

It wasn’t supposed to get this bitter,
or this intense. To slip silently out
of someone’s life once you realize

they never had any intention of
fully being in yours. These decades length strangers.

They’re not old enough for real explanations
the narrative is cheap, incomplete and flimsy and

out of my hands.