Perhaps, I Am Your Son {A Poem}

How did you discard me so easily?
Leave me by the curb,
On the other side of the dunes,
When all I wanted to do was swim with you in the sea?

How was I your son,
Yet now some wretched boy you pretend not to know,
Gone into some shell of his own,
A shell I cannot see yet can feel against the concepts in my mind?

Did I make it easy for you
To cut the ties that once bound us to our fantasy?
Did I teach you something I did not mean to
Or did you teach me something you had never found profound?

I am not a beaten man or a victim that you see,
Perhaps I walked away unwittingly
Perhaps I was just the oil in your cup of tea
Or perhaps the illusion was simply my cocoon.

Maybe in that time then
I was a chrysalis whose head was buried in the sand
A butterfly not yet ready to escape the illusion’s gravity
A pearl not yet found in the shell of my own mind.

Maybe I believed a lie
Yet I am not sure who told it best
So now I just breathe as your former son, brother
And you exist as those I used to know.

Perhaps it is not my heart I find
In broken pieces on the floor
Perhaps those tattered shards are nothing more
Than strands of silk that held me until these wings had grown.

Perhaps I was never part of you
Not born into certain certainty
But married kindly into some sort of tragic story told
Repeated over and over again in a mind letting go.

Perhaps these welts are not the wounds I feel
And these scars are not my enemy.
My friends are these memories that live within close proximity
My family is these lessons, the air that carries me.

So, perhaps I am your son,
Not born of you but still-born to you
Of you, beyond you
Crushed, I’ll be the fragrance on your shoe.

There is no greater freedom
Than lying naked on the floor
Drowning in a sea of tears and sweaty memories
Wishing is was different but loving that it is exactly as it is.

Perhaps we are but teachers and students still,
Yes, perhaps I am your son rejected,
Embraced by love beyond the fast illusion of who I was
Instead, becoming who I am.