Speculation

My mother’s bitterness drove me,
made me successful,
though that was not what she intended.

Of my two parents,
I believe her the sexually driven,
accounting for her depression
and her awesome anger.

She had been abandoned and left alone with her children.

I was the Boy Blue meant to save her,
to bring the salve
that would ease the pain to her pride,
having been abandoned for God.

Except, I ran for my life.
Indeed, it turns out, I was Hansel.
I opened the door to the oven
and pitched her in.
And then I ran for my life.

Oddly enough, it was her anger that saved me.
I see that now.

I love sex too much.
That, too, I believe, is my mother’s fault.

I have sometimes thought my father must have been gay,
as my own son was.

From my father, I get my poetry, my attraction for woman,
and my almost uncontrollable anger;
but also a tendency to kindness and for children, love.
He best loved silence and was depressed by noise.
Among her eight children, he was her favorite, while what he loved
was his freedom among the Mende people of Sierra Leone
where I was born.