I can’t begin to guess about how many years
it’s been since I’ve thought about my parents:
how my father swung his belt for small infractions.
I felt the leather but didn’t see myself as heroic—
I was a little boy, not Ornytus in The Aeneid,
but sometimes I couldn’t remember my name
the next day. I was a traveler on a treacherous journey,   
a kid in a continuous crime scene, an angry victim.             
Two damaged strangers owned the slowest part of my entire
life, and I think about something, something else I’ve told
myself: I wonder whether I’d have shined brighter if lovely
people had raised me in another family, earlier in the century,      
if my sophisticated mother would have played vinyl Coltrane,
telling me, When you listen to him, your heart shatters.   

                                    Note: most of the end words are identical to those in Terrance Hayes’ poem on page 45 of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.

– David Spicer

Author’s Note: I’ve been writing sonnets lately, and having read Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, I thought I’d try to use the end words in them for one of my “family poems” that are part of a new collection.