Untitled V

Her father stepped out  
into the garage, as I sat in an old  
vinyl, high-back bar stool  
smoking a cigarette, contemplating  
my 'prodigal son' return home.  
 
He never struck me  
as being a happy man: mostly stoic  
in his outward mannerism.
 
For two months I was a quiet  
mouse, moving through  
a foreign landscape of people  
I didn't really know.  
 
His daughter, my 'friend',  
was a hard lesson to learn,  
and looking back, her mother  
wasn't really put together  
upstairs, either.  
 
That night, he said something  
that still perfumes the halls  
of my memory.  
 
He told me that his daughter  
wasn't very smart, and he didn't  
expect much to come of her,  
but I needed to stop fucking around  
and go back to college.  
 
In my naivete I suspected  
that I knew what I needed to know  
about life, and what I didn't  
need was another blue-collar  
dad preaching about the merits  
of earning a degree.  
 
I left that home shortly  
after the one and only brief  
interaction I had with him, and I've never  
seen any of them since.  
 
Sometimes I wonder what he'd think of me now.