Paternal.

When I grow up, I want to meet a man.
Fall in love with him the way that I fell in love with the way my grandmothers perfume mixed with the smell of cigarettes.
Know a man and all his honest and indecent cracks and nooks and crannies better then he knows them himself.
And marry him, holy matrimony, vows, rings, all of that ever so sweet lovely shit.
And then I want to make that man a father.
See, here's the twist.
This is the part of the poem where love starts to decay, rot, stink.
Where I look at life from a birds eye view of a shanty town in Haiti or a war-torn village in Pakistan.
This is not beautiful.
This is not polite.
This is ugly and real and perfectly haunting.
When I grow up, I want my children to have a father.
But not any father, you see, no he can't be marked by dust on any other day than Ash Wednesday,
 or sing at the gospel every Thursday instead of Sunday just because he feels that way.
No, this man's truest love can not be himself.
This man's biggest accomplishment can not be his own ego.
This man's most promising aspiration can not be written in greed.
You see, he must be a friend of sacrifice.
We together, must grow like new borns, in patience and acceptance.
Let a single gold band covering only a thick inch of skin be a symbol for eternal commitment.
I will not let him exchange his "I do"s for " I did my coworker"
I will not let him exchange a flower delivery for divorce papers on valentines day.
I will not allow myself to have kids who will resent their father.
Some people change and that's the problem,
Sometimes the problem is that they never really changed at all.
It is the innocent who mistake the infidelity of ones soul for purity.
His wit, a clever snake, offering true love, a future, the ideal life all squeezed into a juicy ruby sphere.
But allowing myself to bite into the fruit could be the deadliest mistake I'd ever make.
Because of the selfish sick I must be forever cautious,
So here I am:
rarely playing black jack with my care and trust,
hardly looking twice into a creek rumored to contain cottonmouths with lies for venom,
barely looking to a bar or church for a being so incorrupt.
When I grow up, I long to hear my children cry as least as humanly possible.
To have family dinner several times a week.
To go to every soccer game, ballet recital, theatre show, or rock concert.
To never make my own offspring question whether they want their mother or father at graduation.
Divorce will never be a word in my vocabulary.
Husband will always be associated with forever.
Love, eternal.
Father, altruistic.
Family, united. Unseparated. Together.
When I grow up, I want to give my children a father unlike the man my father turned out to be.

/////My entry for the NSDA's Spoken Words Contest////