I think your father not punching you in the face
was a sign of his love.

You asked me why with every punch in the arm
he said he loved you.

You knocked his glasses off, called his new girlfriend a slag to your mum.

A 43 year old man who finds himself in pint and a fight on a Friday night tells me how he would lie  
awake at night, wanting the warmed up arms of
his dead father around him in a children’s home room, he thinks you must want it.

And this is life, buy, sell, rent out fields, standing with the stocky sweating  horses, by the spitting crate fire, a lad who works for your Dad says his father would take the belt to him and  it never did him any harm,
I wait for the punch line, a joke, but he meant it,
own van and paid cash in hand, so it’s business.

Your uncle, who you tell every traffic warden punched a traffic warden for giving him a ticket, says schools should never have stopped caning people,
physically restraining people

You made up and hugged, your father says you curled like a baby, a father and son, you needed the warmth and your father’s hardened calloused hands scrabble at the art of human atatchment,
always too precious to be left to humans,
trying to pick the flame off the top off the candle and keep it in the tender part of our hands,

I think your father not punching you in the face
was a sign of his love.