thief

tight in your eggshell
relentless you paint out
your memory no days
with me no jagged
scenes with your dad

you steal your hours
from your self
from me from the great
blue curved sky
triangles cut out
revealing black night

you stole my life
my daughter my one true friend
gone now taken by the tortured
little girl intent
on glueing the shell
back together

This poem is about Becky Jo Bradway and what happened when the memories she had ignored and suppressed about her father came on and destroyed her that terrrible year that she left me, 1993. Although I had some familiarity with incest and its damage, the arc of this story was so very much worse and it included me in its effects. Because I became the father of a girl I became linked to John Bradway. Thus what romance may have been left in the relationship was completely displaced by what happened twenty five years before. And I had sympathy for the woman and the girl that lived in her, but she took my child and she left me, something she swore she would never do. And I suffered too. For what I did not do. Nor could ever do. Mistakes I have made, but the deliberate destruction of your child, for whatever reason, is beyond my imagination. So call this Humpty Dumpty. No one could put it together again.