One may be able to infer from these words the nature of an inner struggle. It is a struggle that has endured in one form or another since childhood. Now that I’m a father, now that I look every day on my baby son and experience the wild array of emotions that come with watching him coalesce and evolve, this struggle has become all at once completely inane and yet all the more intense. It is winter. My one method of preference is exposure. Yet I have a powerful new reason to cope with the fears and uncertainties that have plagued my being for as long as I can remember.
I must be
I must be more than memory,
more than just a name,
more than faded echoes cast
from pictures in a frame.
I must be more than faint suspicions
coiled in the heart,
smoke-like apparitions drifting
through a starless dark.
I must be more than supposition,
more than just a guess,
fashioned from a dust that fell
through years of emptiness.
I must be more than stories told
by uncles, aunts and kin,
anecdotes of vague recall
from time beyond your ken.
I must be more than fantasies
of how things might have been,
conjured up to fill a void
that widened in my stead.
