I love words.
I came across this poem of Thaddeus O'Neil's amongst a few others of his in a British fashion/culture magazine in 2005. His work is difficult to come by, with what little is published of his out of print.
He is incredibly gifted with words...below is one that reminds me very much of my own dad.
HIM
most everyone who met him
fell in love with my father
was especially true of the kids who knew him,
the kids on the block, the kids he taught and coached,
all of them
always told me
how great my father was
and how much they loved him,
and they used the word
LOVE.
my sister and I could never understand this.
it had to be a mistake,
surely the just didn't know him
the way we knew him.
or maybe
that was it:
maybe they knew him
as we had never known him.
we loved him of course,
but our love
was as a camel loves water:
with a
LONGING,
based as much on a hatred of thirst
as a love
in drinking that thirst away.
we never understood
why he didn't try
to make us fall in love with him
the way he did with all the other kids.
for a long time
I stockpiled and analysed his many faults
to prove all those kids wrong,
to prove to myself
that he hadn't so much as failed me
as that
he wasn't so great
afterall,
to prove that these kids had made a mistake,
that they had confused him with someone
or something
else,
that they had been scammed,
that my father
was a cruel myth
like Peter Pan
or Superman,
a figment of their own clutching
longings,
a convenient invention
of their
desperate
imaginations.
I've spent the better part
of my twenty-five years on this,
only to finally realise
that Peter Pan
and Superman
and my Father
are real.
