Tracks

So, I absolutely never get on here, but I'm going to try harder to actually post things, promise. At the moment, I am too lazy to write anything long and eloquent, so I will start by saying, I have some major daddy issues. Also, they've been on my mind a lot lately. My latest assignment in my Advanced Poetry class is a poem of work or unemployment. I definitely meant to go in a different direction with this, but I just wrote what came to me. WARNING: IT IS VERY VERY VERY VERY ROUGH. THIS IS UNREVISED AND UNWORKSHOPPED AND I WROTE IT IN A FAIRLY SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME. That being said, enjoy. Well...as much as you can enjoy a Daddy issues poem. Also, the spacing is really stupid on here. It's supposed to all be single spaced (except for the stanza breaks) but instead, it double spaced everything and super spaced the stanzas. Stupid. Oh well.

Tracks

Dad used to spend all his time driving trains

back and forth from Thayer. Mom told me

tales about how she’d seen him passing through

and she honked and waved and he smiled

that big smile, said he’d be home Thursday

after he dropped ten thousand tons of coal

off at the Arkansas border.

He was always leaving, coming back, leaving,

but it was Mom who finally left when

she smelled the whiskey iced tea he always

drank while she was watching us, their toddler twins.

He was forced to choose, but he denied

his alcoholism until he failed Burlington Northern’s

random drug test, but by then we were long gone.

They gave him another chance, and he sat through

AA meetings until he’d regained their trust.

He replaced the whiskey in his forty-four

ounce Git N’ Go cup with Hawaiian Punch,

which I always drank during the few weekends

when his work schedule allowed me to see him.

When he failed his drug test a second time

nearly ten years later, they left him, too;

he was forced into spending more time in his house

on Poplar Lane, where I was a phone call

and twenty minutes away.

But he rarely called, and I always answered,

but I was always too busy, always swamped

in academic success and extracurriculars.

He’d run out of excuses; he had nowhere

to go anymore, nowhere to hide from

the daughters he never got the chance to know.

I always wished I could’ve seen him

do what he was proud of; I wanted to get

stopped at the tracks in the woods by Mom’s

house and see him waving, hear him whistling

and calling out my name, saying he’ll see

me soon, just as soon as he’s back in town.

I imagined him inviting me to ride with him

like he said I could when I was younger.

He’d be sitting on his iron throne, dressed

in his black jeans and steel-toed boots and flannel,

ready to tour my unknown and his familiar.

Maybe we’d go on his old routes to Nebraska,

where Mom was born. I could sip his Hawaiian

Punch while he smokes his Winstons, and I could

watch him be happy and successful,

and maybe I could be proud.

Instead, he never calls, and I never call,

and I never visit and he never asks me to,

because we’re both too tired of trying

and neither of us know what to say, anyway.