Son Of Words

By Adam Stone

I am a knot in the branch of my family tree;
the bastard son of a bastard father
who attacked my mother with a blade and a gun
and filled my embryonic mind so full that I dreamed
fierce and vivid enough to bleed these roots red
and grow up blind to the ambivalence of aggression.

I am the missing face
in my real mother’s false family photographs;
the never mentioned,
(never forgotten)
number one son,
the airbrushed face in her nightmares,
the hushed “Nothing” when someone asks what’s wrong.

I am the what-might-have-been,
passed into the hands of strangers who deal in strange babies.

I am the second hand that ceased my adopted family’s smoking;
the little white liar who turned my mother’s thoughts
from mortality to morality
with the push of a pen and a twist of twisted truth.

I am the needle that drained the Catholic from my father’s blood;
the private, secular child, chosen
when the Catholic Church turned it’s back
on a formerly faithful altar boy.
I am the needle
that turned my father’s Christmas Tree into a common fir.

I am the lost gospel of a forgotten faith;
what Job might have been thinking had God and Satan been gambling on a neighbor’s soul instead.

I am the Hindu widow before the pyre;
reincarnated in the form of a cat
leaping from peak to peak without falling because he’s afraid
that the adage about landing on feet may not be true.

I am not the son of fate.

I am the lone-wolf,
packless hiker
trailing off to the sidelined,
jocular editorial commentary
to whatever deity will give me their time,
consumed
by my eternal internal quest to find out who the hell I am.

Am I the bastard my father made me?
Nothing more than a bullet from his fully cocked gun?
A random strand of genetic destiny?
Or was I molded by my adopted family’s hands?
Or am I an orphaned nomad cursed to question
every thought, every act, every decision placed in front of me
by God or Shiva or Allah or some author? No.
I am not the sun this planet revolves around.
I am not the son of fate,
not the son of faith,
not the son of God,
not the son of man,
not the son of that monster,
not the son of his gun,
I am not that son of a bitch.
But I am a son

of words.