Fragile

I knew a guy who was fragile,
the scary kind of fragile.
And I don’t mean your mother screaming,
“Those are our good plates, the ones I got from your grandmother
on her death bed
so don’t you dare drop them or I’ll be so far up your ass
you won’t be able to sit straight for a week” kind of
fragile;
He’s the “don’t let a butterfly’s wing touch him
or he’ll spring a fault line from his belly to his skull” kind of
fragile.
He used to tell me he’d like to come back as a fly
so he could sit on the table by his father’s bedside
and find out why he cried every night.
Or why he drowned out the sounds
of people cheering at awards ceremonies,
chanting his son’s name at baseball games
with Jack Daniels and gunshots on TV.

I knew a guy who could tell you what dysfunction tastes like.
He could tell you the inner workings of bad memories,
illustrated with shattered glass
and landed punches
and screamed insults
with sickening clarity.
He told me what misery sounds like;
it’s sort of a fist pounding on a dinner table
just once
and then the sound of plates and silverware
jumping to attention, mixed in with a little bit of
lost innocence and whispers of,
“You really are a worthless piece of shit.”

You know, one day he told us all what freedom sounds like
he said it exactly was like
a chair falling over on a wooden floor
the slow swinging creak of rope
and a pencil moving across lined paper, writing,
“You know, I really tried. And Dad, no matter how hard I try,
I can’t hate you. I love you.
Now, I know you act the way you do because
I don’t think you heard that enough growing up
and I know what that feels like. This isn’t your fault.”

Yeah, he was fragile.