Is not a matter for literary study

That kind of feeling festers like sepsis

in darker chambers. Each of those

Negro men had a story to tell, a song

and dance for sons as though a bar and hop

Could do no wrong. redeem it. Did not.

Theme of a child he could not abide

in silence, rooms, vodka-soaked dramas.

Counter-theme: a mother, his savior. 

But why was the one forgiven? Not act, 

but process. Agony as redress. When 

at last we arrived at the grave of loving I

abandoned words as a point of ceremony. 

That much evolved into a first write-crisis.

We crossed, he and the one who favors him 

in crow-eyes, sugar-tongue, blacker brow

as a seal of birthrite, deceit as the price

of living. (Rage was a bridge across glacial

embraces.) Later, after proving yourself worthy 

of yourself came the task of forging on as in 

forgetting, not another routine order. Provident-

ially I remembered. If, not like. Now you ask 

the next question, son. How does it end, do you

forgive? Nothing clears the air like a leaving. I live 

with what I was given, wave claims, decline

the chain. Truth is a valid way of beginning.