5.26.17

We’ve become a family

of memory-sharers,

memories stacked like coins

behind our eyes,

and I can only hear

my father speak the same stories

so many times.

Sitting at dinner under bright lights,

the outside world so dark

it’s like the house’s wrapped in black tape,

nothing visible from without,

only the inner stuff,

only the insular heat of our private experiences

is allowed to escape into the bright wonder

of the room.

Here, beneath the lights, we,

this family of ours, these hearts, these hands,

these wandering eyes, these broken souls, of ours,

panic like mystics at the dawn of science,

learning, for the first time,

what it means to be fraudulent

in our own skin.

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Written at 8:58 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, after a pleasant family dinner.