Family Tree

I am the surplus confusion of my mother, the left-overs of Uncle Tommy – sous chef and demon lover, the aftershave of my father, and his father before him. We are what we are, but of course there are the missing links, the ghost branches, the genetics of glitches and other social chicanery. Time hides what we are in the windfalls, vestiges that end on the forest floor, illicit bones forming invisible roots. When I was a child I had a swing on one of its lower limbs, leaning back I would watch the sky rolling around, never thinking that it was I floating by that was the stray leaf.