The Stone Journal
Eruptions are not selective. Everything get's burned equally.
A living book About the dead
Becomes testimony If the subjects still draw breath.
Small paper rooms where things unsaid drew breath between two
invisible souls, But suddenly all that blood
filled the vesicles and the organs and eyes pierced the nakedness
Like a Scalpel.
Nay—
Like a rusty Spoon.
There is the ordinary: Ticket stubs. Weather. Sawdust of a days labor.
The kind of scraps a life keeps to one day look again and remember the tiny forgotten joys.
But the mind for her inner world stumbled in innocence and a young morality.
Not as a daughter opening paper, but as a giant stumbling through a city.
And there I was, In the sunshine of her anger.
Under law.
My tenderness made evidence. Every mile given motive. Every meal, every laugh, every child dragged beneath the black light and ordered to confess.
To love a mother is well, unless it is the wrong kind of love.
Or comes at the wrong time.
His was both.
So the years fell backward.
All the old rooms changed color. Every laugh, every dinner The quiet nights and the games in the sand.
All our lives. Suddenly the memories were not the warmth of a man loving deeply and like family.
They were the desperate manipulations of a prowling wolf.
A hidden love may poison a present without counterfeiting pasts.
But not tonight. Time travel went back and killed the boy.
He loved the children as children. The father as a man. The house as a house. The mother as a flame He kept it behind glass so long even she mistook restraint for coldness.
Call that cowardice, maybe.
He caledl it hunger buried alive.
The long theology of not touching the thing that burns.
But do not call a life's kindness the long game.
How could she know that he hid to preserve his soul and sanity alive, that his mask was not corrosive, but preservative.
How could she know her wellspring Fell in love not with the performance, but honest breath.
The same earnestness that made his accuser feel inspired and loved.
That man was never a lie.
Do not say the beach lied. Do not say the miles were lust in flops. Do not say the hand on the shoulder was a thief rehearsing.
That is what rage does when it rides upon righteousness.
The trampling steed.
It needs one villain large enough to hold the terror.
It needs one sewer-word for all this human weather.
Debauchery.
God, what a word.
A word with mud on its boots. A word that wants no face. A word that makes a woman porcelain and a man the filth.
As if she had no ache of her own.
As if the man arrived with a rope and not a knot.
As if love were only clean when it had permission.
Juliette taught us that even when there is no ornament, or possession, Love still has binds.
Now everyone is guarding someone.
The daughter guards the mother. The mother guards the wreckage. The father guards the name of the house. God, maybe, guards the silence.
And he, he stands outside it all, holding the match, holding the wound, holding the years that were real even if now the paint peeles back.
There is no defense that does not sound like pleading.
No apology that does not sound like strategy.
No explanation that can enter a room where the hammer is still swinging.
So let the notebook close.
Smoke burns my eyes.
We let the child hate him with the clean bright hate of someone whose playrooms just made a terrible sound.
But somewhere beneath the rubble there remains this:
He was not lying.
He was sometimes failing.
There is a difference.
And God help us, it may be the difference between a man and a monster.
This is important. Because he always believed Himself a monster.
While mother was teaching Him to fly.
Reality arrived, revoked the license, condemned his love of flight and hacked in the most cruel way possible the wings.
Wings that bore him.
—