Member Poem

I inconsolably wept a river of sorrow
starkly aware alienated daughter(s)
implacable woe sundered fatherhood
yesterday, today and tomorrow.

A series of unfortunate events
(move over Lemony Snicket)
set in motion since my birth
unleashed impotent scrawny infant
registering 3,000,716,593 third
baby born on planet earth
swaddled emulating uterine hearth.

Oblivious to death, his ear splitting yowling
triggered lactation, which kept him alive,
where he blissfully suckled guaranteed immunity,
yet thru childhood chicken pox and mumps
he gain said grim forecast and survive
living social threescore and four years
amidst emotional travails
including life threatening bout
with anorexia he did thrive.

Mein kampf and lovely bones
analogous to graveyard
the wind thru unmarked tombstone moans
issuing melancholic tones.

Quintessential tear ducts relentlessly secrete
grim reaper who no mortal can cheat,
yet offspring must not precede parents,
hence tis regarding scythe
(memento mori symboling untimely death)
stealing prized progeny,
and forever silencing her heart beat.

She leads charmed enviable life
physically active with all manner of sport
unlike yours truly and the wife
whereat the former (an aspiring wordsmith)
experiencing psychological demon
that brandish blood dripping knife.

Accursed pained longevity I must bear
illustrative of existence,
where mental health did career
all too human to err,
nevertheless daughter will not forgive
no matter schizoid personality disorder
inherited courtesy one or more forebear
me, the singular son and addle brained heir
sired by Boyce and Harriet

whose pop and mom genes
transmitted self destructive traits
that did unwittingly impair
embedded within mine being
analogous to knitwear
fraught with mistake
and evident in me a longhair
pencil necked geek near
to thinning out viz receding hairline
versus once golden locks xtra ordinaire

when just a lad mistook me being queer,
yet homosexual preference rear
if non existent, yet notions
of same sex flagrante delicto thoughts
flickered decades ago
regarding to timeshare
once skinny self while at Antioch College,
especially when unexpectedly approached
by scantily clad Adonis
donned in frilly underwear.

As one sexagenarian
becomes more sanguine,
he nevertheless struggles to decouple
his boyhood, adolescent, late teen
and emerging adulthood
experiences that left bitter
after taste of quinine,
and prompts tremendous us to pine
for halcyon days recalling mine
blissful years at 324 Level Road
Collegeville, Pennsylvania
they mostly ranked as divine.