Empty hands

' First, I took first '...
Mama held my hands high and swayed my report sheet like a duck gracefully glides on water

I barged into his corner but he was not there...

I stared at his portrait . His fine stub and clean shave spat his several lessons on cleanliness on my slate
My twin  tower of my pride and confidence diametrically  caved

My sophomore years were years alone
I watched men hunched by their kids
I searched right and left in hope of his blazing white collar that echoes his amiable presence.
But  Mama filled both parts.
She joggled her work shifts and the need to care for me.

Sometimes , I look out  and spoke to his absence; create his effigy:
I draw his own very frame , plant him a moustache and redress his stubs.
I wanted him to come and speak those words fathers speak to their sons.
Words that convey maps, the shape of stars and the linings of the galaxies to the ecstasy of a curious boy.

And now I became a man.
Never had the privilege of cuddling him.
Have him pat my back when I excel in my class,
Or have him cheer me up when I fall in the attempt to scale the hurdles of life...

On this very day I wanted to ask him all the questions in my heart;
He already kicked the bucket.
Tom👻

Deep

Deeper,
Sharply curved like brooding palm fronds ;
Her accent brawls high like raucous billows of a raging wind,
Poise so proper
Pain knitted behind the soul of her feet,
Life got her spines propped against the walls of gagged expression.
Her own voice she sniffed  like a dog petrified by its own bark.
She stood on the stage of solitude and rehearsed into the void...
She knelt and wept , bruised herself with  the detritus of the fallen mirror and wailed:
I am woman ; I am not the weakness of manliness.
My face ain't for your fist cuffs  to stab like like the abhorrent flashes of neon lights, nor my belly for your feisty punch,
 but my back ,your fingers to moistly tend,
my spines your arms to lift;
 and my torso your palms should nurse in strides, as a skilled brick man  lays shiny cobble stones .
Tom👻

Sepia

She veered off the rail of elegance like a cookie cartwheeled by sinister flat tubes of wantonness


She went on and on
Until,
Like a pack of virulently shuffled card in the numb numbness of the motherless night,
Her gait crumbled.....

She was the queen of my heart but the King of all my sorrows....

Tom🤕🏄🏽

Festooned

She ran her shrunken fingers across the stains on the apron of her effort ,
Like a child in a rare admiration of  dirt's glamour,
She dipped her crumpled thumb into her sooted tongue and licked the juice of grief ...
She wondered why her frantic efforts at life and enterprise  never earned his emotional comfort nor his conscientious goodwill...
Nothing has changed except hope...
It appears cloudier...
©broken verses
™Tom