The same traffic

that once evinced thoughts of familicide

in my father’s father a lifetime ago

crowded the streets today.

I discovered last year

that you drove these streets too,

tires in the same tread

separated by decades.

Sitting here now, in the car park of what was once

your school, our strange, rediscovered acquaintance, I reflect

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that you drove longer: from Palos Verdes down the hill,

across the Vincent Thomas and the old Gerald Desmond,

bridges I know well, and probably parked in this same lot

blaring Frank Zappa, Fast Funky Nothingness and Yellow Snow,

championing rebellion through the lowered windows of a battered car.

Did you find comfort there, isolated in your strangeness?

I wonder about you sometimes and if we share anything

in common. I suppose we must, but you never knew me

as an adult. I struggle to think what you knew me as at all.

We were estranged far before I left, and perhaps that’s where

we’re similar: our sour sadness and our regret.

You never spoke much about your life

other than to say that you opened the garage door to release

the car exhaust that would’ve suffocated your father,

that you pulled him out and “socked him a good one,”

and that you never should’ve been a father yourself.