You were my biggest mistake. In the yard,
our second son gave way to a shard
of glass and still, you did nothing. Kept mum.
Knife to air and he was taxing the sum
of his being and still, you let the night sky
slit his throat into a scarf a father’s eye
has to weep itself to sleep with. Tell me, how can
these hands wager a life without seeing the man
his boy would have become? The answer: they
have to. So you’re never coming home. So I’ll replay
the lost reel in my head, forgetting, if only for
a second, about the real loss ten years is still sore
from carrying—that grief is nothing but a debt
of shared skin I wish we had not lost its bet.