He was not a monster
but could imitate one so realistically
that the uninitiated could not tell the difference—
and now his act begins again,
stomping around the center of the toy room
destroying anything in his path:
the dinosaur models he’d helped assemble and paint,
the slot car track he’d pieced together
and repaired on other days,
the identities and unmarred surfaces
of the children he helped imagine into being.
Only the toys at the edge of the room
had gone unnoticed.
The eldest boy might be seven or eight-years-old
and sits petrified, eyes turned always downward or away,
kneeling amidst brokenness and bruises
trying to hold back the cries of the inconsolable
if only for the benefit of the younger two;
so he begins breathing deeply, finding composure,
throwing his mind into a distant future
where he can write about this
as a man beyond the reach of such dire shadows
as a man much older than the figure now before him
and as man who cannot forget the boy’s amazement—
watching discreetly as the father builds a cemetery
inside an amusement park
