That night I shallow-slept with firelicking inside my eyelids           I dreamed an auto bio-documentary,A Mother's Mistake, and re-imagined being born to a mother        who sneeredlike a debutante returning her first plate to its kitchen.I wept myself awake then & listened to my bedmate snore—her sweet surge of breath rhyming with theburgeoning streets below. I longed to know, to touchthe foreign machine of her,        less than a pillow's thickness away.But in our first kiss, her mouth clamped to a smirk                as if it held a shot of sour medicine;        as if she could taste how I was mismanufactured& bio-chemically rinsed in a steel sink to be filed under a stranger'sname & address.She         slept             supernaturally                         while all night,            I watched the dark-ness as if it might disobey. I expected my father's phantom toemerge like an alligator from the room's horizon of shadows—          I believe in ghosts, because I am used to the intimacy          in cold spotsbut nothing moved except the Morse code prayer of my pulse.That next morning I stared at the undifferentiatedtissue of my body—a key unlocking nothing.It didn't matter which word tickled, turning on her tongue,or locked me in the solitary closet of my body.This is mostly about the mind, isn't it?            The expectations of failure;the familiar spirit of personal cruelty.            The deliquescent nature ofrelationships & how I think of my father whenever women look            past me.                    Here's the real question I'd like to ask my father:            What might you have told your real son about the nature of            love-claiming it, feeding it, keeping it alive in spite of its instinct to            thrive                                                                                                                    without you?What might you tell a son you loved        about the hieroglyphics of bodies                or the nature of culling desire—        as a man, what exactly should I surrender to?Let me answer the question you have of me: No.You were my idol. Of course I don't know how to love                    but I know how to be shamed& no two tears fall or taste the same.