i'll never be my father's son

he’ll never drag me to the garage to teach me how to fix our old BMW because my hands are too

weak,

i’ll never be who he goes to when he is too old and frail himself to shave, but

he’ll never be a man in all the ways i hope to become:

soft, gentle, content—

i’ll selfishly take (our) face

(because i’ve always taken more after him than my mother)

and reforge its planes to be sharper, eyes soldered and set in steel to intimidate,

but always leaden in the mouth cleaved by love.

i’ll tarnish (our) visage with butches and femmes, transsexuals and genderfreaks, commies and radicals, dykes and fags and fairies

until it’s engraved with the echoes of time spent well

and holds tenderness in grooves worried by the hands of me and mine.