To Daddy

I grew up calling you "dad," but the name never really suited you. I tried and I tried to act like the girls who ran into suit-clad arms when at five o'clock the day was through You were never a man of emotion, daddy "Pull yourself up by your bootstrings," you'd say But I saw a world that couldn't be pulled together, so I sewed my eyes shut to hide the world away. I spent years and years trying to thicken my paper skin, folded, torn like anything you handled with your beefy callused hands Mom insisted we were wired identically I swore I never heard anything more absurd than to become the monster who devoured everything I held dear and screamed until my vision blurred. We were two bulls in a battle of horns, and, daddy, you couldn't see your stubbornness through I sighed and I sighed until I realized I could never find a bone of a father in you You were thirty when I was born, butyou didn't learn a damn thing past seventeen. Mom was twenty-eight and pregnant, yet you kept refusing To see that there was a little version of you With all your flaws and mother's, too When she came home she could only cry, cry, cry And when she grew up she tried to die, die die I shriveled at your touch, and you never knew why. I went through any man who would take me, my black and blue little heart reminded me of you How as a child I died and I died inside, until there was nothing I could do but sit in my little room, and think of how I'd evaporate from you Like mist I'd disappear into the clouds, Until I knew That I could release my stiches, daddy My ignorance and hatred, too. All my searching and grieving over what I thought was a lie, When all I was searching for was you.