8.2
I walk with the dreams of the child I was,
who walks with his father, handsome and hurried.
My mother is young as the first wish of love.
The ember of youth is a crumbling fury.
A man is a paper sack full of sins,
greasy with donuts and coffee twice brewed,
calloused in hand and sodden in liver,
pale as his vision and bruised as his muses.
Dimwitted, dull-eyed, the ember gone dark,
dollars to donuts and donuts to dust,
liar to lover and lover to jerk,
child to father and father to shark,
a man is the door, the car and the lot.
Men, in the end, are their work and their luck.
originally published in Fjords Review