A Son of Affluence Comes Home

After landing, he took a cab to the old house on Judson and paid the driver but forgot his cellphone in the back seat. Hard winters had worn the green trim of the gables and the fence had been patched in back with new iron, but the house retained the imposing, overbearing grandeur it possessed during his childhood. Beyond the front door, the worn shell of his father laid on a hospice bed in the parlor next to the ebony piano, which no one had played since the last time he came home, when his mother laid dead beside it.

Isaac On The Altar – A Poem

There are no words
There are no warnings
There are no walls tall enough or thick enough
There are no laws or rights that matter to those lost
Or those left
Not now, not for them
There are no ways to undo what has been done
No way to erase it from the chalkboard
There are only empty desks
Empty beds
Unfinished drawings in crayon and marker
Presents under trees that will never be opened
And hollowed parents
Who will carry their hopes and dreams
In small wooden boxes
To hallowed, earthen cradles
And bury the past and the future.