A poem about Brussels.
Fatherland
Fatherland sounds like Disneyland
But for fathers.
Their eyes shined in the red light
Of women made to order,
Women prettier than their wives,
The mothers of their children.
When the fathers finished,
I walked with them through cobble streets.
We stared into a window
At a man playing cards alone
In a dark bar, a father himself,
And he invited us in.
His English was broken
And he was losing solitaire,
Missing a queen
That was stuck behind some king
In his lonely K-town dive,
Kaiserslautern, Germany.
We drank black ouzo
And didn’t talk much.
He asked us
If we were looking for women
And the fathers always were.
So he said Psst.
We waited to hear his secret
But he never said it,
Instead he put us in a taxi
And it stopped at a pink neon sign
That read Psst, which whispered the secret
He didn’t tell us:
The implication
Of three-hundred dollar
Glasses of wine
And men gone too hard
To get hard
And a thing about fatherhood.