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My Father Is Not My Prophecy. From October 22nd, 2023. It is all temporary and moments are gone in a flash of bright blue and scotchbrown orange. It is like I have opened the windows in late October and let the rain in for the night. There is a shivering cat at the end of my bed and a thrumming from the top of my spine. Tuesday’s are but a day to sit and read and watch. Eventually I will cry again and eventually I will sleep. The moments are temporary and linger on forever, I remember seven years ago and five years ago but never yesterday. If I stack up books in front of screens will I read If I tear at myself another night will I feel free October is questioning everything and hiding in draping coats.  There is a shell I run to, built up too tall. There is a cave where the dead poets reside and the whispered yawps make their way into our dreams. You cannot rub the steam from the mirror quicker to see if you are changed. It is only at night when it rips itself apart from your spine and you are left alone, that you know it has been done. We forge into the snow white night and hope never to be seen in the morning. I am but a boy, and a son to the world, and to my mother. I am at odds with the dawning. Wake me up if I oversleep or scream out in the night. I am going back home and you can not stop me.  There is a house I haven’t thought about in years, for fear of remembering. If it all comes back I will have no choice. It is small and white and sits unassuming in Michigan. I remember a house only monumental to me and wish it would finally get caught in one of those forest fires. If I could see the ashes I would know the truth. But the only thing that climbs out is a matted oversized husky with a snapped chain dragging from under her legs. The time always returns itself when necessary. She has nestled her dusty muzzle under the back of my knee and eight isn’t so bad anymore. The tops of the trees chase each other on the plastered baby blue sky, a small neverending game of cat and mouse. The guns cock and the turkeys scatter past the neighbors’ trees. November will be different or maybe the spring. I have made it this far and mother nature isn’t a thief. I will hold onto November.  I cannot see him as a man, just a hardened wax figure of a western cowboy. He is always brooding and condemning my pouted lip, a pop to the mouth. He is always in the driver seat of the pickup truck, the headlights fighting past the stacked pines. He is always sighing, trying so hard to push out the dread. If he could get it out he would be fixed, but there it sits atop the tobacco. He is younger than me most of the time, he is more scared too. This always surprises me, how tender he can be when I give him a second look. After all, he is still my father, a man I am made from and yet I cannot see how my skin is all of his. The leather seat between us pushes me closer to the door handle. If I stare deep enough into the brush will the elk finally trample our truck He spots the black ice and his arm is above my stomach and I have a sharp stabbing guilt that he might actually care. We are free from the gliding and grip desperately back to the gray faded gravel. The roads are empty except for us and we have returned.  The house is heavy with all of our temperaments, our neighbors have been warned. How can a boy haunt the woods more than the spirits I would hope only to try. He twists his calloused hands around his chin catching an itch at the edge of his peppered beard. I want to watch him and memorize, as if he will be gone forever. I am studying him when he finally turns off the engine, our breaths echoing the silence. We play the game only fathers and sons can play. I will outlast him, I have learned quick enough his ways because they are my own. Our breaths pick up and I can see him eyeing my own introspection, he is still my father. He doesn’t speak but offers a gesture. He hands me a slightly crumpled plastic water bottle , if this is his way of loving me I would take it standing tall.  I search again across his hunched back and khaki jacket, thick around his neck. He should be mine but yet to see him feels so perverted. I want to lay my hand across the back of his head and see if he is more than wax but I cant find the courage. I accept that I have come far enough.  When you are named after someone it is common to either envy or despise them. Every person with someone elses name has gone through the ritual. It is common for boys named after their fathers to hate them. It is common, I tell myself. Fathers are all the same and we are all sons. When a man takes his son and brands him and then leaves him discarded by the street, he makes a choice. He chooses for his son to hate him and to never forget it. And unfortunately I do not hate my father, but I do find a queer torture in his ability to strip me cleanly from the bone as to find a new person inside of the flesh. If he would just hug me I would probably fold and beg for him to stay but the leather valley pushes us out of our seats and I wonder if that was the last conversation that will get to be only ours.  It is these nights that I look for him in sixteen, a boy still unblemished by circumstance. I look for the chance of myself in his smile, if I ever could find one. I look for joy, where is it hiding and how can I release it like the banjo on the radio does on sunny days If only I could catch him now before it all. It is in this hope of a person I leave my love for him, if he cant find the courage to have it, sixteen can.  I think I’m losing the boy I was a little bit more everyday. The world has a way of unveiling you even if you aren’t ready. I have gone to sleep too many nights unsatisfied and I question if that is what makes you a man. Do I only grow more unsatisfied until I end up stiff and waxy like him I wonder if when I am a man I will finally say the things that run across my head over and over until the tracks are left swollen into my skull.  Twentytwo is thick silk cocoons cracking. It is spreading out orange welcome signs and embracing the wind. I pluck guitar chords and sing to sixteen most nights, in hopes he will feel okay. It has always been enough. I wonder if now, with less boyhood, I must do it again. I wonder if this blunt torture just always follows. I wonder about a lot and end up most nights with nothing, and yet I still have my messenger wings. I want to find twentytwo in my father but he still feels forbidden and the fight is less worth it. My father is not my prophecy.