When I was a kid there was always this poor taste on my attitude that made me want to crouch to the kitchen and sneak a sip of my father’s coffee. But I think what I really wanted was to steal a hit from his voice without him feeling it, thinking doing that would teach me how to speak and carry myself the way he always did, which was usually with patience, calm and poise.

I remember it being so sickeningly sweet as it slid down into my stomach, that and it always faintly tasting of his pipe tobacco which smelled fine enough, until you smoked it and it left this egg in your throat made from what I imagine a house that had burned down would leave there if it were ground up into a potpourri, occupants included, with you downwind.

It dropped into the acid cave of my stomach and poisoned whatever good time start I was hoping to ride on the back of all day in the time it took to make a cup of instant. “Yuck, that was stupid,” I said out loud from my bedroom where nobody except me could hear me try to get my father’s tobacco and coffee-flavored kiss of kryptonite disappointment out of me I now love to sip on every morning to remind myself of my strengths and that it was never really my father’s coffee, but how my father fathered that I didn’t like.