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A poem about Brussels.

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Fatherland

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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.