He drills his voice into the walls. .

The house obeys, the little boy just stalls. .

Danish vowels heavy on his tongue. .

Each word a hammer, every silence slung. .

He came home from the Navy like a storm. .

Sea-salt rage packed into a human form. .

Dyslexic shame knotted in his fists. .

Letters mocking him in swirling mists. .

He cannot read the love in his son’s eyes. .

Only defiance that he must chastise. .

Power is the only script he knows. .

So tenderness is just a pose for fools and “those.” .

He lines his children up like troops at dawn. .

Inspects their faces till the hope is gone. .

A crooked grin, then thunder in his tone. .

He breaks them just to feel less overthrown. .

He learned as a boy to swallow every plea. .

Now he feeds that hunger to his family. .

His father’s belt still echoes in his head. .

So he swings with words and glares at them instead. .

The child studies terror like a creed. .

Learning how to earn a glance, a crumb, a feed. .

John Bowlby waits in pages years away. .

But tonight the boy just fears the end of day. .

He clings to any warmth like burning coal. .

Anxious hands around a vanishing soul. .

“Don’t leave, don’t leave,” his heartbeat prays. .

To men who only know command and haze. .

The father’s chest is armored with a sneer. .

Inferior to everyone, so he rules by fear. .

He mocks the boy’s soft tremble as a sin. .

“Stand up straight, you sissy, don’t give in.” .

Humiliation drips down kitchen tiles. .

The child’s red cheeks replace the adults’ trials. .

Modification comes in tiny cuts. .

He edits out his needs, his voice, his guts. .

He learns to scan a room like hostile seas. .

Predicting waves of temper, small reprisals, pleas. .

Every slammed door brands another scar. .

Each quiet night a distant, unreachable star. .

Years later, in a therapist’s dim light. .

He names the pattern that has stalked his nights. .

“Anxious attachment,” written in his file. .

A diagnosis for a long-denied exile. .

He loves like a child sprinting through a fire. .

Chasing absent fathers in each new desire. .

Clinging to the ones who push away. .

Reenacting judgments of that Navy day. .

He sees his father shrinking in his chair. .

Old and brittle, drowning in stale air. .

Power now a threadbare, faded coat. .

Still no “I’m sorry” rising in his throat. .

The son decides to cut the ancient chain. .

Not by forgetting, but by naming pain. .

He will not pass this script to those he loves. .

He builds new hands, not fists, from tattered gloves. .

Yet some nights, shadows march along the floor. .

He hears that Danish rage behind the door. .

The boy inside still flinches at the sound. .

But now a gentler voice stands its ground. .

“I was a child, not your broken proof.” .

He whispers to the ghosts that haunt the roof. .

“This reality is taboo no more.” .

He lights a candle where his father swore. .

He holds his younger self in steady sight. .

And walks him, shaking, out into the night. .

…

DCG