House of Moratorium

If things had been different... Such an innocent phrase, naive, used by both the young and hopeful, and the tired and empty. If things had been different, maybe I wouldn't be the latter. Maybe I would be looking ahead to the shining future of a young professional; "I'm a writer!" She says, with all the unearned confidence of a lamb masquerading as a tiger. But it wouldn't matter how many wolves licked their lips, she would persist. The world nothing but her oyster, her deep sea diving suit comprised of the ring on her finger and a four year degree in a field that doesn't pay unless you never ever stop swimming. If things had been different...I could see it, all of it, steadily waiting on the horizon line. If the affair never happened, if the strokes never struck down my father, if my heart didn't break every day for a decade feeling my mother's resulting resolve and desperation, if they had chosen to to tell me sooner that my conception was

Huddled in my car on the first of the year, The blowers turned up high, My face blasted by the heat, but my body won't stop shaking. With no other sound but my heart and its quickening beat, There seems no better time, and I start to scream-- "Why won't it stop?" I look for You in everything, But I just don't see where You are. See, my arms bear the marks but my heart is the scar--Jagged, filthy, And I have no reason to feel this way, No reason to scream at the stars and their Maker. Many have faced worse than I, and their worse will stay, so why won't it stop? I could try to explain, try to teach anyone what makes me this way, But I cannot help them understand, Because, Father, I see you move, but I don't feel Your hand. Why won't it stop? Of all I've given, and I've given a lot, Why won't it stop-- The endless seeking, the internal bleeding, the hole that never really seems to close. No matter how I try to fill it, al