❝ patriarch ❞

[litany]

I once knew an old man, a sad man, a one-man Blitzkrieg,
who, it seemed, never learned to lay anger into stones
instead of children or ex-lovers.

I'd hear him each midnight's peak:
fighting broken-bone walls, inebriating old homes;
and I pictured him: a stranger facedown in the ghosts of others.