For My Daughter, May She See It When I’m Gone

It’s a fucked up world
and I’m sorry that I am
so happy that you are alive,
I’d rather be angry
at all of this shit,
but the sun is still shining on me.

It hurts me inside
to know you’ll inherit
this brilliantly faceted stone-
into one end
pours the blood of nine-tenths,
from the other pours a blinding white light.

How do I show you,
without tearing you down
or stealing your innocent smile,
that living the way
that your parents do now,
off the sweat of a marginal life,
is not at all like
the way that your father
thought he could live with himself?

How can he put on
your shoulders the weight
of his failures to what was right?
How can he ask you
to be your true self,
but to change in ways that he could not?

I though I could stand up
for what I believed,
but I’ve fallen down, flat on my face,
time after time after
time after time after
time after time after time.