Fracture
(for Yvonne)

I never knew why an exemplary father and mother divorced. Called it quits. An abrupt split deeply pierced an eleven-year-old's happy heart—for it seemed our lives were wonderful and full of elegant interplay. I was hit hard by that terrible word... DIVORCE. A painful imminent separation. A dichotomy of flooding ominous emotions of infuriation from a child's vexed anguish, pulled by the poles of mental grief, relief only found in frowns, while a heated battle for child custody—like a thief in the night—invaded our once harmonious home, a sister Tasha and brother Bruce kidnapped.

By court decree—damn a mother's cryin' plea—a demolition team muffled her screams and clipped from her secure wings intertwined wires of optimistic fires extinguished natural affinities leaving a family detached by friction.

[redacted]

Cleavages in badge ramming through the door to snip a mother's babies from her broken embrace, as hope could no longer provide her prayers, received as lies from heaven high. A strong woman stood her ground but, no matter how much she fought, the sheriff's rip current threw her violently down. Ever since that hated day, I've wore a cold frown for having to witness a beautiful vibrant mom lose her fight for joy in life. Her world beset by the intrusive alien power, black robed indifferent judge ordering a great family divide like the Red Sea opened wide or gouged eyes...

I've been on a roller coaster ride with tears of a clown since we—Arnel, Craig, Tasha, Bruce, and Joe—watched a woman in desperation become a mere shell with no will left to survive.

No more sincere laughs or smiles as she began to rapidly descend in the hopeless waters of insanity, contemplating suicide... which she tried while Arnel succeeded and died. As her wish was a quick demise: to swim far away from the reality of marriage dissolution and a family snapped apart. Our bridges of hope collapsed into rubble. We, the debris of severe polarization that like a shattering earthquake, fragmented our nuclear unit, scattering sparks of atoms, divvied to foster homes of strangers—my precious Kelly, are you out there somewhere?. A family dispersed by bitter estrangement.

This, I curse. As with children everywhere, I grew fractious by annulled relations, disintegration of an aesthetic compilation, a musical fusion ruined by fissure's rift—adrift love—waging war with dismembering axes of alienation. Siblings caught in a maze of fission, ripped and sliced as repelling splinters, disentangled by the cookie cutter that is the terrible enigma of jigsaw puzzles in which, even as an adult, I still mourn. So don't tell my bruised heart that in time, it'll heal...

Joe (OKera) Valentine #C47779
P.O. Box 7500 (D4-212)
Crescent City, CA 95532