PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Eternity was fully explained ,not by conversation , but by the smack of wings between the clay roof slats on my hilltop childhood home. Fifty a year or so ,mist sticking to the bodies. Our back garden became lined with flightless bones. By age seven I’d started to put shards of old potpourri in my pocket each time I had loose change so the smell of copper wouldn’t remind me. I was born with the taste of it in my mouth ,an unwanted preemie with little expectation. Doctor's had said if I made it over the two week mark it would be on time I had borrowed from someone else. Thus,I spent my life trying not to spill a drop of fire that sustains me,cut fingers were the devil. A confused batch of codes that carried my Mother’s cancer home and left my Father with permanent sugar high.
Those horror films that usually gave teenage boys an excuse to comfort with over the shoulder groping hands and cheesy lines sent me into catatonia. I tried to watch “Scream “ for the first time after a particularly difficult day in the hospital ,I had counted the gathering window condensation daring that there wasn’t a single thing in the world’s expanse that could make me braver then having to witness the one person who had been my touchstone wither inside the skin that barely held her now.
Memories of kidney shaped dishes lined with the unprocessed contents of her stomach mocked me as I only just made it past Drew Berrymore’s death scene before seeking the refuge of a pillow. Soap sting met my nose ,the smiling killer had gotten me too (gotten all of us) - lacking much a chase to show for it. I could never be enough of Mom to find the missing partner to that sock lurking in bottom of the shadowed pile.
Dad’s man-child ridgness had always been dimming specter to my head full of dreams and untapped ambition. The sad times were those when he tried to try and understand ,but I still wasn’t the one with strong pitchers arm or the refined young who could shorten that blow by providing a wife’s structure. My stubbornness a reflective complement of everything wrong with him made right,maybe to an extreme - but one I need. How they stayed married confused me , it wasn’t about love - not for her anyway.
I remember the brief snippet Mom let slip about a boy she’d known who’d drowned in the lake while she was still in her ruddy cheeked phase. While Pop spoke of would-be German speaking nurses ever pining in walled-off cafes ,languishing promise of what might have been had the heed of the been fallowed. I wanted to escape that fate ,as it is thankless in an unmeasured way. Forced me to hold on to everything to roughly ,shaking those around me as rag-dolls before they turned . A blue eyed raven ,the kind haunts all broken hearts. The dead do loom ,but I didn’t expect her to being living among them. Her mind didn’t come back to us, it started slowly with hazy switching of our names then grew into bouts of staring off blankly for moments on end. I’ll miss being called “sun “ ,the late baking. My children (should I have them ) won’t know Grandma singing . What if I forget? Her personality crossed in wires. It floats like loose sheets paper filling with echoes she repeats ,the attachment gone. To see the shell and know that no handbook ,stages of grief or well meaning casseroles can undo the spreading damage ,marks blood’s most frighting power of all : It still functions ,lives?... well that’s another matter .