the beekeeper.

the weak-hearted man with calloused palms.

he was a man of stubborn drive,
a twin separated by one year,
a ben hanscom with thick glasses.
born as a minority in a sea of racially vicious children,
he grew up with split lips.
his ribs remained bruised from the pointed cowboy boots his father wore in an attempt at replicating john wayne.
his coming of age emerged in the form of a correction facility.
he grew up urging mute kin to speak.

and yet this tainted upbringing birthed a saint.
this familial black sheep,
despite all odds that God had feverishly taxed him with,
became a truly loving husband and ultimately,
when the time came,
a devoted father to an angry red boy.

he raised the little devil with a wise disposition,
and he taught the beast to see in shades of grey.

and oh, how the horned boy adored him.
though wolves tattered his ankles,
the demon found tenderness in his father
and a bond that could never be broken.

until she.

and she,
in all her beauty and all her grit,
unintentionally,
irrevocably,
took red-handled shears to the twine connecting the boy to his father.
and she,
without any say of the matter,
bore a hole so deep in the man's heart that only she could weasel into and fill.

as they always do, things changed.
she took advantage of this newly dawned power.
she wrecked havoc on the man's home.
she clogged his drains.
she ripped up his carpet.
she stabbed steak knives in his drywall.
he desperately tried to clean the mess,
but a tired, working man can only do so much
in such a short amount of time.

this is the epitome of a weak-hearted man.

the boy had to watch his father swallow his own tongue
and allow his lips to crack.
the blood of a savior spilt on unlawful grounds.
she lapped it up like molasses.

their temple will forever remain cracked,
believes the son,
until the father can wipe the blood from his lips
and use his calloused hands to dig himself out of the grave he so blindly buried himself in.
with handfuls of dirt,
he must prevail,
for the hell-bound boy remains linked through blood,
and in turn shares the same fate.