Dad

Ode to Papa

I couldn't stop thinking about you
the way you oppressed and
supressed and depressed me
for all those years.
The father I never knew locked in his
other relm.
Somewhere high in the tower
where cigarettes and zig-zags
cover the floor.
Love consumed me then.
Attention Affection Emotion Dialogue and Diction Denied
Blocking my Ballad of Epic Epiphany.

And I am left with some
sense of sentimentality; emotional overindulgence.
Ignored was an understatement.
I was screaming
and dying
Stabbing myself with repetative satire.

My love is a red, red rose
bleeding to find release.

It was hard to relate to my father when I was growing up. He was always busy doing other things. Either working in his home office until far past dinner or as soon as the weather improved, out in the yard until the sun had long set. I would follow him around in the yard, just waiting until he gave me a job. I would do anything just so I could be out there, with him. Whether I knew it or not, I loved that man with all my heart.

I can remember when I was ten me and my dad went to the local golf course to play a couple holes, and when we got up to the door of the clubhouse there was a sign that said you had to be twelve to play. I was heartbroken. He always said we would go back, and for years I believed him. Telve can and went, so did thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. Finally the summer after I graduated, two weeks before my parents told me they were splitting up, we had our day on the green. He spent the enitre time rushing me because he thought the people behind us were going to catch up and get mad that we were going too slow. We ended the game three holes ahead of them. that was my golf game with my dad.

When I grew older my view of my father changed. I went through different phases in my feelings toward him. I hated him for a long time, a lot because of the divorse, but some because I felt I didn't have a father growing up. I've since started to see the love that others always said was there. I think because of the physical distance from him, I was able to see him, and my relationship with him, differently, and from a more objective perspective. I realized that the reason he consumed himself in his work was because of me, yes, but for a reason I didn't always see or even want to admit. He consumed himself in his work because it was the only way he could think to give me everything he thought I wanted; A home in the suberbs with all the comforts of an upper-middle class life.

Papa, please get the moon for me; the book that was read to me by my father when I was young. I used this book while developing my entertainment discourse. It helped, along with all of the other things that I mentioned, in the process of examining me and my father's relationship.