Parenticide

This is a really rough first draft that I threw together late last Monday night for my Tuesday morning prose poetry class. For it being just that, I thought it didn't come out so bad. I'll have to add a bit more imagery, to really flush out the poem, but I figured I would share this first draft now, and then repost the update. Hope you like it. Also, read the ending note

Parenticide

           The word “hate” is a word that truly should be saved for the most wretched and depraved people someone can think of. That is why I think every adolescent, or young adult, should tell their parents that they hate them once. Once, and only once. Make sure it’s said on a warm summer morning when things have been going pretty well between the two of you for the last couple of weeks. Make sure when they are up about to rush off to work, or off the hair salon, you get there full attention and say in a flat, and lifelessly calm voice, “Mom/Dad, I really hate you.” Make sure when they say the “what’s” and the “why’s” to answer them, cause they are your parents, or stepparents, or even adopted parents, after all.

Make sure to tell your dad how you hate the stiff smell of coffee that he makes in the morning, how he praises you when you do something good, or how he reminds you to get a job, when you’ve had one for the last three years. Make sure he knows how, yes, even though our house has the most lights on the block come Christmas, that all the people who come over for the house party really hate him as well, and the men will never invite him out with them on their golf trips in the summer where they hit a triple bogie, but play still because they love the sport. Make sure that he knows that even though he was there for you when you got sick, when you got bullied at school, when you won your first game on your sports team, and when you needed someone to check under the bed for monsters, the secretly wished he hadn’t made it to the game, because he was in a car crash, or that he was the one sick with cancer or necrotizing fasciitis, just so you didn’t have to deal with your cold, or that you wished that there was a monster in the closet, and that it ripped him limb from limb.

Make sure, if it’s your mother you catch that morning, that you show her the same amount of honesty you showed your father. Make sure that you let her know that she honestly makes the worst chicken-parm this side of the hemisphere, that how she did look good when you were younger, but has put on several pounds in the last few years around her belly and hips, and how no one cares about her interior decorating. Make sure that if she really could have been, “a great actress” or “a great singer” if she wasn’t busy having you, that she should have been those great things, because the thought of having been inside of her for nine months, the idea of being part of her filthy body, the very thought that she had given birth to you, often makes you think of suicide at night.

Make sure to say all of this, and never speak of it again.

Make sure that if you win the noble prize later in life, or win MVP on a sports team, or win the lottery, or make it big on Broadway, that you make sure to thank mom and dad for everything they did. Make sure they see the sincerity in you expression, and that you really mean it when you say it, because they won’t hear what you’re saying. They’ll just hear what you said that day years ago. Over, and over, and over, and over, and until their dying breathes, that’s all they will remember about you.

Also, this is not about my own parents. Well maybe it is in part, but I think its just an exaggeration of how I feel at times. I don't hate both my parents this much, so just let that be known.