Fauxbia

The deep and sonorous voice of
His defeatist self-talk was paternal,
And torturous, reinforcing the force fed
Message - there is no happiness.
Only gradients of misery -
Leaving him indifferent to the present,
Careless of the future.

Reared in the shadows of perfection,
Parental conflicts played out
As the "self-made men"
Of his father's generations
Chased ambitions beyond
The cramped lives
Of their own youth.

Affection and approval, bestowed,
Withdrawn, by the performance scale.
He was a sundial, numbering only sunny hours,
With little to say;
A lucid, inquisitive and fertile mind,
His native endowment a vivid sensibility
For the beauty of words.

He learned woman from
His quint-essential sisters,
Yet remained profoundly ignorant of women.
If love were happiness
It generated a loneliness
Made all the more desperate
By the intimacy of severed connections.

Psychic numbness, and fauxbia,
Yes, he feared being false,
Had plunged him into darkness,
With a vision of
A minimum level of connectedness,
The raw ache of personal loss,
The empty feeling of helplessness.

Forced to live as that outsider,
Trapped inside a family's feuds;
Being bonded to survivors,
Learning to live with the understanding
He would be jettisoned for others to survive:
Emotional dishonesty became
Necessary for survival.

Denial was the best defense
Since he couldn't change the situation,
And repression
Had long since
Ceased to offer relief;
He was too articulate for that lie.

The tightly packed crowd
Contained inside his head was
Momentarily frozen by the question -
How to unlearn the lessons of his youth?
To love and be loved, a necessary condition,
A prerequisite to a happiness
That could not exist?
Now, he works, and writes
And trusts in simple verities;
Chaos. pacified by distance and routine,
Serve to mitigate the sting
Of reality's' reminders -
To find that so urgently sought,
Only to have lost it in the finding.