I’m Not Frank Ocean but

My mother used to ask me

Did a tornado come through your room?

I have never been the kind

To keep my clothes confined.

And at that age,

I scattered toys everywhere like I was trying

To use up every square foot of my space

But a tornado never went through my room,

Just me.

A tornado did go through our house

A couple nights a week

But it stayed behind doors

And pretended to be a mouse

Late at night you’d hear it squeak

Until you fell asleep to the sound of it

My parents always swore that our house

Wasn’t haunted

But I saw ghosts everywhere I looked

I heard them at night,

Outside my door

Sometimes they crept in,

Uninvited,

To sit on my bed and keep me

From getting too warm.

The worst thing that haunted my house, though,

Was heartache.

It shook the walls,

Reduced me to rubble,

And left me somehow

Smaller than I was

When I was younger.

My father took his life

After an argument

When I was thirteen years old

And he took mine with it

In his wake

Because I spent the next ten years

Wondering what it would have been like

If he would have stayed

And thinking I wasn’t worth staying for

And wasting away

Afraid of the next thing

Life would take

If I wasn’t careful

And didn’t hold onto it

So hard

That it might break.

Come to think of it,

What came through my room was

A tornado after all

Because That’s what I called

Myself

When I was not ok

Because I left a mess

Behind me

Just like my father before me

And I need to get into

Better habits

Like breathing in the morning.