put a church key in your pocket

I'll steal a hacksaw from my dad
And cut the braces off your legs
-Tom Waits, "Kentucky Avenue"

the criminal kept on getting caught.
and every time, he'd lie and look
for all the world as if he thought
he was innocent.

he was a thief, but not
by any stretch of the imagination
a very good one. he had a wife,
and an only son who once looked at him
as if the world hinged on his words.

and he always kept a church key in his pocket.

it fit into the lock on the door of a chapel which no longer existed:
a fire had claimed it years ago, and by now
even the rubble had been removed to make way
for a strip mall parking lot.

he said that the key kept him safe.

he'd do his time in jail, and his son
would grow older while he was gone.
each time he came back, the son
was just a little less interested
in what he had to say.

the criminal was an innocent.
he committed crimes but deep down,
somewhere, he wanted to understand
the world and make his peace with it.

the son did not see this.
he did not see the searching glances
his father was unable to stop
himself from sending out toward
the unbroken, uninteresting midwestern horizon.

the son was a teenager when the man
got out the last time. when his dad came
home, he wasn't there. he was away
at a friend's place, listening to music.

the mother and the father ate, and fucked,
and went to bed. the son came home
at 3am, and stopped by the door
of his parents' room. he listened to his
father's breathing in the darkness, and then
he went to his bed and slept.

a few hours later, the father woke up
and got out of bed. he walked down the hall
and watched his son for a little while, from
the doorway, in the early morning light.
then he left to go out looking for a job.

the son soon formed a habit of looking up at the sky.

it was a freak accident, really. the criminal had
been working at the garage for just a few weeks,
and he was walking home late after
closing up shop one night. the driver didn't
see him, that was all.

at the funeral, if someone looked into
his pocket, they would have discovered
something surprising: the church key was gone.
and somewhere, someone's son
had a hand in his pocket, was humming
a tune, and looking at the sky, and
thinking of the father
he'd tried so hard to love.