Legacy

Here we are at last
The rest of the story
I never wanted to write
The chapters have come and gone
I needed you....
I missed you....
I don't like you....
I don't want to be you....
How many times have I said it
I.
Don't.
Want.
To.
Be.
You.
Somehow I've never escaped your hegemony
And it is true that it's your face I see when I look in the mirror
Here's the pause
Where everything stops
And I try so hard
Just to see things for one second like you
To find peace in the legacy you've left me
For the first time I finally do understand
Though it's nothing about you
But I know what it is like
To return from a war in peacetime
Wakened cold and sweaty
Beaten bruised and bloody
With no enemies left to fight
Nothing to fill the gaping hole left by your patrimony
Only now at the end
Can I fathom the truth
This absence is a kindness
Whether your absence from the thing called 'Father'
Or mine from the thing called 'Son'
And so here we are at last
The rest of the story I never wanted to write
In which our hero
Will erase borders
Engaging in diplomacy
Not out of compassion
Nor from affection
This deed is born from necessity
A need to end a war that's raged for decades
Hard fought and well won
Darkness falls when what you've given
Returns to you
And I am born anew
No more words
No more verse
No more pain and
No more nights wakened cold and sweaty
This absence is a kindness
For one cannot exist while the other lives
And I understand only what God must have felt
As I kill your first born son
To wash away the sins of the father

What I Am

I tried so hard
Not to be you
Not to lose myself in your legacy
Yet here I sit
Branded "Monster" by some
Flawed to others

So it seems
No matter how hard I try
The sins of the father
Shall be visited
Upon the Son

With no concept of words like
"Fair" or "Deserving" or "Deliverance"
I'm continually bombarded with reminders
That I came to beBecause of you

All the reasons I can't be you
And more importantly
All the reasons I am
I've run so far to escape you
 I've denied the fundamental aspects of myself

Denying the truth of who I am,
What I want and how to love
Simply because
I never wanted to live like you
To be like you

Like a poor marksman,
I missed the target
And I see you
Everytime I look in the mirror
Its your eyes I see

When my heart aches
With the loss I live with
Consequential to my own choices
I think,this is what you must have felt
Deep Down and never Said

Until I remember
That such a thought
Such compassion
Such empathy
Its beyond you

And suddenly I can breathe
I am not you
I am flawed
I am imperfect
Maybe even a monster

But I'm alive
In the knowledge of who I am
How I came to be here
And I can say it
Definitively and finally

I am not you.
I am not the sum of your wrongs
Or even my own
I can say goodbye
and live.