Gene W. Notes #12

Maybe you’re in every poem I put down
If not in the words
then in the cadence
in the anger
in the olive stamps
on the knots of my fingers
in the genes…

Gene is a siren I don’t hear
and my genes are an emergency
you’re not privy to.

I see the geneticist, I hear your name,
I write the one you gave me on the forms.

Maybe you’re in this gene disease I have
not because of paternity
not autosomal recessive or dominate
nor allele or carrier,
not carrying any part of me.
But because I cannot forgive
you for only being a father
to me for a little while.

So the illness is my doing
in this injured thinking
and my own fault
is the root word of this mutation
in which you know not,
Mea culpa in which you say not,
as you laugh loudly in imagined form
as you tell jokes in forgotten language
in a homeland familiar not mine,
that I can only find the road to
through a neural pathway.