The Boy

His hands are around my ankles, that boy I was, tugging me back to see him. I knew him not, hardly can imagine him or review him again in a reflecting eye. Adults talk of their youth, poets embellish, but I am older than any fresh faced poem and the curtain calls and cheers of long past years are dimmed. I cannot hear him, how did he speak, what future did he hope to be? There are no photographs, no sound recordings. The child is mute, the curly brown hair, his bashful curious stare are left loosely articulated in a warped frame of incomplete memory. Yet today he tugs and catches at my mind wanting to be seen, acknowledged, loved. I turn around seeking to find that self that I grew away from. I sense he wants to lead me back to where we lost each other. To show me the bifurcation of our life, where he died that I might live on as a man. Two things I know we still have in common: he was a lonely child, and today without him, I am a lonely man.