The same traffic


    that once evinced thoughts of familicide


    in my father’s father a lifetime ago


    crowded the streets today.


    I discovered last year


    that you drove these streets too,


    tires in the same tread


    separated by decades.


    Sitting here now, in the car park of what was once


    your school, our strange, rediscovered acquaintance, I reflect


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    that you drove longer: from Palos Verdes down the hill,


    across the Vincent Thomas and the old Gerald Desmond,


    bridges I know well, and probably parked in this same lot


    blaring Frank Zappa, Fast Funky Nothingness and Yellow Snow,


    championing rebellion through the lowered windows of a battered car.


    Did you find comfort there, isolated in your strangeness?


    I wonder about you sometimes and if we share anything


    in common. I suppose we must, but you never knew me


    as an adult. I struggle to think what you knew me as at all.


    We were estranged far before I left, and perhaps that’s where


    we’re similar: our sour sadness and our regret.


    You never spoke much about your life


    other than to say that you opened the garage door to release


    the car exhaust that would’ve suffocated your father,


    that you pulled him out and “socked him a good one,”


    and that you never should’ve been a father yourself.