The down slope steepens under my boots—
knees remembering every mile,
gray threading the temples like first frost on barbed wire.
Failure still sits heavy in the ribs,
that room’s sealed tight with macaroni necklaces
and there’s still the faintest echo of a door closed, hard.
Thankfully, the hands haven’t quit.
The mind still turns.
So I write.
I build.
I leave something behind.
This’s my duty now—
plain and stubborn as sunrise.
No hope of her gratitude.
No hunger for her thanks.
I’ve learned the hard arithmetic of fatherhood:
some debts you pay forward no matter if the recipient ever picks up the check.
So I build her an estate in ink and truth.
Page after page, night after night—
a legacy stacked like timbers and stone,
a house of words raised from the wreckage I once called a life.
Every poem a beam.
Every honest line a joist.
Every book a foundation stone.
Every scar I name on the paper another room she can walk into someday
if and when she’s ready.
I do it because it must be done.
Because a father’s job doesn’t end when the palace becomes a prison,
or when the daughter locks the way to her heart from the inside.
Duty doesn’t ask for easy.
It only asks for faithful.
This writing keeps me alive—
the steady hammer of keys at 3 a.m.,
cold coffee, cats fed, car payment made,
neighbors’ names still half-lost in the smoke.
Each sentence pulls me one more step down the slope
with something worth carrying.
Each paragraph’s another breath when the chest wants to cave.
Each chapter of hard truth is proof I’m still in it.
There’s quiet hope in the doing.
Not that she’ll read it tomorrow,
but that one day the words will still be standing—
solid, unapologetic, full of a father’s flawed and furious love—
long after I’ve taken the long nap.
When that final quiet comes,
she’ll inherit an estate far richer than the money:
a lifetime of blood and honesty poured onto paper,
a map of where I stumbled and where I kept getting up,
a shelter built from everything I couldn’t say out loud
but could and did write down.
It’ll all be there
saying,
I was here.
I loved you wrong and fierce and forever.
I kept building when there was no light left but the one I struck myself.
And that, daughter,
is the true inheritance I’ll leave behind—
not perfect,
not pretty,
but real.
And it’ll still be here
when you’re ready to come home to it.
Even if that’s only
well after I’m for good gone.
As men, we're taught, no matter what, to keep our mouths shut and find a way. Inherent in the message? Nobody cares. For me, six-plus decades of this explain Mr. Thorogood's stanza, "You know when I'm alone, I prefer to drink by myself." My dad was a surgeon in Vietnam, two tours. He came down a 130 ramp wearing a red ball cap with the acronym "FIDO" across it. As a young kid I asked what it meant? He said, "Fuck it, Drive on." Hard times, even harder man. No one has all the answers but one thing I've learned from life is to never let your storm get your kids wet. Gut says you've got a hundred reasons you could've but didn't. And that in itself is a huge win.
I know you well enough my Brother that none of this comes easy but it is what must be done. You know well enough the legacy I too am building as the days are numbered and the scars and wounds never heal. They just stack on top of the last one. What is left behind can ether be a burden or a blessing to the recipient if not accounted for. But a legacy lives for generations. For that is what you are building for your daughter.
We work through pain and labor as if it’s a key component of our survival, it’s in the blood, not ment for others to notice, care to cherish, or to spill… but raging as it flows from one generation to the next.