Up In Smoke

*(-Winner- of the 'Son/Daughter/Mother/Father' competition)

No, not yet  
Its too soon for you to die old man  
Even though you've earned it  
   
Smoking Lucky Strikes by the pack  
No filter between you and your sweet tobacco  
Burning away your days  
Inhaling smoke and ember  
Scrawling wrinkles on your face  
   
Cancer's come a-calling  
But I'm the one that's wallowing in a sorrow  
Only Jack Daniels knows how to handle  
   
A candle's worth of light    
Upon this desk tonight    
As I spill out words and booze-soaked breath  
To take the edge off my regrets when it comes to you,  
The Father that I never knew   
   
23 years without   
And when you came around  
I had no idea what to do with your presence  
So just like all my other problems I let you hover  
Sit there, until I had an impulse of something other    
To do with you than to spit the curses of my ignorance  
   
Sparing you a glance every now and then  
A chance conversation   
Scraping details off the surface of this relationship  
If you can call it that   
I don't know if I would bother  
   
But for having never met  
We held so much in common  
Talents  
Humor  
Apprehension of higher powers  
Facial structure, a given  
And this separate life that I am living  
Makes me sigh a heavy, booze-soaked breath of relief  
   
What will there be left for me to reap when you are gone?  
An empty bag full of questions?  
Shrinking footsteps I wished to stand in?  
The one-sided story of a good but injured woman  
left alone to raise a son, stamping out an impression?  
   
A handful of correspondences  
Emails  
Phone calls  
Car rides to all-you-can-eat buffets  
Short walks under the shining Florida sun   
In St. Augustine near a fortress by the bay  
Cheering on a sports team  
I adopted because they...  
seemed to make you happy   
   
But that's not good enough for me.  
   
Your loss, I'm afraid,  
Will mean more to me once its real  
And there is no cache of information  
Pertaining to the blood, sweat, and vocations   
Of the variables    
That siphoned into me   
   
But we don't have that type of openness to heal  
And we don't ask questions, maybe, the way we should  
And we aren't close enough to reach  
To touch each other's lives in the way, that probably, we would  
If it didn't take this Jack Daniels to make me feel like a son  
And cancer for you to feel like you missed out on being a Dad