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This is a space where men can share their perspectives on their inner journey. The form can be prose, poetry, photographic or handcrafted images. The purpose is to stimulate, even minutely, the transformative process. All art strives to move us to a different place, that place of the soul, that initiatory space, where the call is heard and identity found. Please reverence the space by respectfully entering and sharing.

June, 2000

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Poems of the dark and the light father close to Father's Day....

You abandoned us
Unknowingly
Without the decency
of running away.

Night upon night
Year after year
You comitted half-assed
Suicide, shooting yourself
Between your lobes
With cheap red wine.

I slowly filled your place,
A son,
But father now as well,
Of two sisters.

One night I dragged you
From a snowdrift.
My tears froze on my lashes
While you howled in your del erium
Above the New York blizzard
That mother was trying
To poison you.

How many times?
I've lost count
And you can't recall.

But these are the memories.
Not ball games, or fishing
Or after-dinner talks
About sports, cars, or girls.

Now this new woman
Who calls herself your wife
Presumes to dictate
From a vantage of eighteen months
How I should feel
About something
I have Lived with for twenty-five years.
And finding me unsympathetic
To her evaluation
She turns to my youngest sister/daughter,
The weaker one,
And tells her I have abandoned you.

And I am expected
To dredge from underneath
The bitterness, betrayal and pain
Another ounce of compassion
From a well long dry.

(1985)

Donald Walker

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:Poem for my Father

It is my blood that wants to be him.

He knocks upon my door at midnight
And bids me walk with him

Through streets with locked doors
Shuttered windows

He speaks to me with silence
Profound

I listen
With the throbbing vessels in my brain.

Sweet legacies of warmth and childhood understanding.

Fearsome heirlooms of abandonment and anger.

A mixing of the oil colors
Swirling together
Across an ever changing canvas.

The spirit of your songs calls loudly
I sing with the music

Sad songs to praise your troubled soul
Glad songs to celebrate my freedom.

Al McLaughlin