Driving the echo of road, the reciprocal four-hour trek from Dallas to Tulsa — North Texas adobe giving way to Art Deco Oklahoma — a memory of my brother watching every collapse of Warren Moon’s Houston Oilers lifts stiff as astroturf into my thinking. That franchise is now the Tennessee Titans, and for a time, my brother’s loyalty traveled with them to the new state. I should be watching the road, or at least the GPS panel, but I am back at the old CRT set we lugged up a flight of outdoor apartment steps. Rabbit ears bent obtuse like the second toe on both my feet, one from neglect, the other a birth defect. And the dial, its click, its philosophy of onomatopoeia.

*****

Nothing eases the need to be beautiful, not even the moral rectitude of being on the right side of history. Nothing succumbs under the thumb of a gentle God. Mercy without fear, without ritual sacrifice.

*****

In the dull light of a pre-algebra workbook, I exhaust my ability to teach. This is common with my children. My patience has not been healed of whatever insecurity it prides itself on. In the unmasked musk of an arrogance, I believed these decades writing poems, counting lines and syllables, meant I could teach anything to anyone. A pedagogical everyman. Yet I can’t inch my daughter closer to understanding the reflexive property: that a is a. Or the transitive property: that if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. To speak it aloud sounds like a jingle for a Texas HVAC company. Failures are our mortal reminders (here, our = my family’s) that control and pride look like siblings eager to be switched at birth.

*****

Turn on any radio, scroll any reel, and hear all this talk of becoming a menace, so many justifications for atrocities, so much moving on, so much AI and innumerable atrophies.

*****

I am convinced that self-hatred drives us (here, us = every human) toward deforming ourselves. Not asking for what we need, not knowing what we want, these are rites of passage for monstrous myth-making. If I could forgive myself not for my imperfections but for my arrogance, my desire to dominate, or any lust for power, might recede.

*****

I am really talking (here, even in error, I = everyone) about freedom from fear. Perhaps this is the hidden gem, the side quest in all studies of art, whether MFAs or the apocryphal autodidact. I exist at the edge, always, of my own annunciation. That angel saying, “Fear not” isn’t a future self, nor a past self made into a pillar of salt, but a small miracle. All beauty flows from it. And, yes, no matter how passe an aesthetic it may be to want beauty alongside wanting to be known, I am sure I am not diminished by believing it.

*****

Lie and belie is the reflexive contrarian’s ethic, and more than anything, I want my children, all children, to learn that renewal is better than self-improvement, returning to the dynamic self is better than hustle culture, that, like Lazarus, we may just be sleeping for a bit, that we need not be afraid.

*****

Let me let Uncle Iroh, from “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” have the final word: “Protection and power are overrated. I think you are very wise to choose happiness and love.”

Steven Leyva’s latest poetry collection is The Opposite of Cruelty.