Leviathan

Dylan wails in vain, Roethke’s waltz of pain

A constant as they drank themselves to death

Lives lived of the sort, nasty, brutish, short

Master the fearsome rage with dying breath.

Triumph coming late, blaming fall and fate

On who springs forth for consideration

Little innocents blind to common sense

Beaten by his blind vituperation

Monsters of the deep haunt my troubled sleep

Anger wakes at mourning but why bother?

When I come across no narrow span of loss

As faith takes me farther from my father

At clear distance seen what his life might mean

In between forgiveness and forgetting

Brambles broke the flesh thorn pricks still feel fresh

Spreading rage on pages of bloodletting

He won’t say I’m proud (at least not aloud)

During days of drug hazed dissipation

When he’d been surpassed terror wouldn’t last

Quelling anger’s mute participation

Sun and son arose lighting what he knows

Rosaceae burst the vessels love contains

Scattered ashes thrown over waves they’ve blown

The sea reclaims what anger still remains

My little ones fear the beasts they can’t hear

Dragons loom in their imagination

I can’t tell them how they won’t hurt them now

Slain and burned in my blood’s incarnation