Jack's poem

A BRIGHT RED HAT

A splinter of moment beckons to a sunlit Saturday.
A moment of my childhood in the deepening far away.

I see a faded old ford and a bright red hat
and my heart gets heavy when I think of that.
I feel the shake as dad lurches through the gears
on our way home from the market with a couple of beers.

We had the same kind of hat
but I was just a kid,
I even loved that pick-up
cause I thought he did.

He wanted to be Bogie,
I wanted to be him,
So I bit on my lip
and I flipped up the brim

I needed to know that it mattered
but something inside him shattered.

Look at me dad, can you see that I’m cool too?
I got a funny expression on my face, just like you.
My hat’s on crooked, and I’m looking groovy
just like you and that guy in the movie.

Well I guess I was only pretending
to be a man, and I’m not defending
what it was he thought that I did.
If I’d known what it was, I’m sure I would have hid

But I wasn’t the only one caught
being someone that they were not.
A man's got to be a man
He’s got to rise and take a stand,
do what he must do,
not get taken for a fool,
though his mom and his wife
were the bosses of his life.

He didn’t have to take that kind of shit from no-one,
least not from his smart-ass son.
Now a backhanded eye glares down at the floor,
at the dirty red hat that mocks him no more.
And his words echo back and we’ve all heard them before.
To show pain is to show your treason.
Cry and I’ll give you a reason