I wish you had told me what it was that bothered you so much.
Could you have even said?
Could you have articulated it in words, I mean,
in plain English so that I could understand you?

Maybe you didn’t know what it was or how to even name it,
this simmering rage you lived in,
this thinly veiled contempt that boiled up into every conversation
except for the ones where you were holding forth,
reminiscing about some favorite era of your past

I asked you once, why you were so angry all of the time
and you looked at me, bewildered, and in a quiet, exasperated tone replied:
“your mother”
you uttered this softly,
as a question
as if questioning my appalling lack of perception
as if your answered explained it all.

But no, you were like that before you ever met her,
as your sister so “graciously” explained to me,
in her droll, dead-pan, take-no-prisoners tone of voice:
“He was always like that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

When you left home at 16, what was your world like?
What did you think was yours to take?  Everything?
How did you prove yourself after you’d failed to impress your father and brothers
by refusing to work in the coal mines?

Did you fear the dark?
Did the close air, the coal dust, make your lungs tighten up?
Or was it the depth of the mines that you feared:
the loose rocks and shale, the shiny slick walls of the mine shaft
too oily and too brittle to clasp onto if you misplaced your step?

Was it the sense of plummeting downward into darkness that overwhelmed you?
Or were you afraid of the fires that closed the camps eventually?
And wasn’t everyone afraid of that?

But how did you live these things down with your two older brothers,
brutes the lot of them,
and your father: drifting and disconnected?

Did you catch hell for staying close to your mother as a child,
baking loaves of bread with her in the kitchen?
Or did you only leave her in disgust when all the younger children came along?
Five more, I think, younger than you.

You told me some of these things.
Yes, God it was hard to get you to shut up.
But what you couldn’t tell me was why
why
why you felt it was your right
to treat us all the way you did.

What the hell, dad?
Who told you this?