Why Are Fathers Homeless?

To be a father,

Is not about sewing the seed,

But committing in-deed

to your family home.

 

Many fathers run away,

Afraid,

When they lay in their bed,

They didn’t make it

Up,

Leaving a mess,

Where love should help clean up,

Walking away,

When courage is to stay,

Facing the lemon, lime and bitter truths,

Arising like a sour dough,

To face the darkness of one self,

In truth.

 

Too many fathers follow their fathers,

Known and unknown,

A genetic messenger,

A behavioural blueprint,

Where the family is woman’s work,

Where love is the realm of the mother,

Yet children are crying out for their father’s,

For they have left home,

For the home is where the heart is,

And he may leave the house,

Or he may leave his home (heart),

Everyone feels deeply,

His absence.

 

Homelessness,

Has nothing to do with not having a physical home,

It is feeling home less.

 

For the home is where you are accepted for who you are,

The home is the place where you belong,

You sing the one song – a uni-verse,

It is where you are known,

Where you can be alone,

Surrounded by those who love you.

 

In a real home,

There is unconditional love,

For when you fall they come around and pick you up, dust you off, help you remember your root,

They don’t throw you out on the street saying:

Sink or swim,
You made your bed,
Be independent,

For all of us have moments in our lives where we feel beaten, bereft and abandoned,

We come home to re-member (come together),

What if – that home is a war zone?

Meeting with conflict, criticism and disapproval,

You will become home less,

You will be less for not having had a real home,

This is the rugged individualism of western culture camouflaging emotional detachment and dis-ease,

Closing the heart closes the mind,

Blaming others for the bitterness nurtured as an unhappy bed fellow.

 

For the father and the son are mirrors,

The daughter and the mother are sisters,

If we do not reflect love under all conditions,

If we do not respect gender,

If we are seen as less and wanting,

The wound festers as love is an abandoned wreck,

A bitter pill passed silently from the father to son,

Where he is never good enough,

He can never make the grade,

He is a failure,

Corrupt and dishonoured,

For to make one suffer is the silent resentment that poisons the resurrection of any hope,

For how can one change their blueprint passed from father to son?

Only for-give-ness is for giving,

Only inner truth as love dissolves untruth as discord,

Humility is not a guilty party,

It is to come cap in hand to understand the other made in your image,

Life is not a Casino or Russian roulette,

It is not chance but to romance the Rosetta Stone,

Why not forget mistakes and misdemeanours,

Have you never made a mistaken de-mean-or?

Are we not imperfectly perfect given life lessons?

Maybe life is really the circus,

Where we choose to laugh, sing and play,

To discover the ring master is the clown,

Performance is for our joy not sorrow,

For to unmask sorrow is to rekindle the joy,

Of the small boy who forgot the fairy floss,

Who was lost and lonely in the crowd,

Who felt excluded and never enough,

As tough love man-handles boys believing it is a hard world in their image.

 

Yet grandmothers see the bluff,

Insights into the gentle heart and poetic wisdom,

Struggling for a higher way yet beaten down,

Succumbing to something less,

For it was never to be the best,

It was not to compare brothers,

But to be your best in becoming,

It was about being the love you seek,

To reach out to the lost and the lonely,

For they reflect you’re very same self,

And the homeless simply lost their way home,

For they do not feel welcome home,

They feel displaced, rejected reaching out for real help,

Their need is your compassion not condemnation,

They yearn for kindness and real care as presence,

For they are your family,

They say charity begins at home,

Walls will not take away the pain of the home-less,

Unconditional love brings the rain after the drought of destitution,

This is how the little plant starts to breaks through the hard surface of an impassive society,

A little light inspires the elixir of life,

Finding life in desert storms of indifference,

As the root draws upon kindly nourishment,

For they are crying for love not a shelter box,

Depression is the emotional suppression they learned from absent fathers,

They have given up trying to please others,

They have lost their fathers seed and creed,

There is no guidance or understanding on the hard ground,

Only a hard surface impossible to break through.

 

So many walk passed well healed with security,

So many judge them as losers and misfits,

Remove them from the streets as refuse isn’t aesthetically pleasing,

They do not see the beauty in those seeking refuge,

For they too are home-less in wealthy homes paved with gold as abundance,

Yet they too were never enough,

For their fathers left them wanting … more,

And this is how the seed of greed is planted in societies who have lost the true root of comm-unity,

For the root cause is family break-down,

An identity theft,

Leaving them bereft in silent suffering that can never be appeased,

Until they face the pain of this inner strain,

For family can only be reunited when all have faced their own demons in the night with courage,

To find the feared snake was a rope of hope,

Waiting on their welcome,

Home.

 

The real gold is to awaken the fool

to REAL HOPE …

for a World-peace-full,

and this is the fool’s gold that leaves no-one wanting!