Dinner with the White Rabbit

Insanity is not dinner conversation,

but the words leak out of my father’s mouth, ink

covering the silence like wine’s red stain

creeping across white linen.  Family secrets

of insanity have been hidden, deep in glass

bottles waiting for the white rabbit

to knock them to the ground and let loose a rabid

disease.  My father’s need for conversation

was born of broken glass

and pages scrawled with ink.

The coroner mailed my father’s secrets

back to him, renewing a stain

he had believed forgotten.  The stain

of his mother’s warped mind on her rabbit

fur stole, her insanity and the kept secrets

of her imaginary adversaries, and her conversations

with air.  The documents covered in ink,

told of broken car windows and shattered glass,

the death of a woman I've known only through glass

panes of picture frames and the stain

she left on my father.  The ink

speaks in medical jargon, nothing of the timid rabbit

that woman once was, or the remembered conversations

between her and my father, tainted with disease and full of secrets.

When my father finally allowed those secrets

to fall from his mouth, glass

shattered under the weight of a conversation

he had delayed for fear they would leave the stain

of insanity in my own mind.  But that woman’s death let the white rabbit

out of the hole, and the ink

from his pen was the blood in me, and red ink

is always wrought with secrets.

I followed that white rabbit,

the creature who once led that woman through the looking glass.

Her insanity had already left its stain,

but I like the white rabbit.  I enjoy our conversations.