When we dined out,
By my father’s decree,
I could order whatever I pleased…
Lobster and drawn butter,
Bottomless Shirley Temples,
And chocolate fudge cake,
With a wig of extra, extra whipped cream.
It was his way of saying,
“I’m sorry for being a drunk.”
I have eaten
the ice cream sandwich cookie
that was in
the freezer
and which
I now know
you were saving
for lunch
Forgive me
the cookie
is gone
but the poem remains
The people pounded their leather hearts and cried
for truth, so the angel blew her trumpet and declared
The number of matchless treasurable lives is infinite
but
you can’t see them with eyes of comparison
or smell what’s marked with the scent of “mine”
or live those lives without laying down your own
and
the people shouted Yada-yada-yada! and returned
to their occupations, and grasped their change
purses with firmer hands and narrowed eyes.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
-Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
You gave up the Nintendo you bought
to the toddler on the trailer floor,
sitting firm behind me, letting me believe
I won at Zelda. The Castlevania music
almost my first memory, with your hand
at my back.
I picture you, sometimes,
as that young man behind your camera,
or building houses on the Sims,
or me creeping from my bedroom
to watch you watch the WWF.
To your chagrin, I often fell asleep
on our Saturday joyrides to nowhere.
My love of Kentucky is because of you
showing me all its places, how you knew
its contours and people–never met
a stranger.
I could go on,
but this is to say that I appreciate
the innumerable instances, the fleeting
past.
And though we may disagree,
sometimes about many things,
I am grateful that you always bridge
our gaps, that I still feel your hand
behind me in how I treat other folks
like you did–as if they were an old friend
I hadn’t seen in much too long.
“All the people who died, died”
–Jim Carroll
“No one here gets out alive, now”
–Jim Morrison
Obituaries in the local paper.
Not everyone dies.
Many pass away.
Some peacefully, some at home,
some surrounded by loved ones.
Others enter into eternal rest, pass from this life,
go home, breathe their last,
make their transition, go to meet their lord and savior.
Death is death. For all and one it comes.
It matters not What we call it.
No one escapes it.
when you live alone
you come to expect
the corners of your house
to take your picture,
but a flash of detergent bottle
that outlives his name begins
to taunt me from under kitchen sink,
whenever i open the doors FLASH!
how juvenile, to stomp on high places
between our jambs; we are a four-legged blur,
of dancing grown ups taking pictures
of kids on a stair step taking pictures.
how dare you say his name.
you cannot take it!
I wonder
if the world
dreams of
me
and if it
dreams of
me,
what might
the dreaming
world see of
me?
Am I
a thorn
or a source
of pride?
A knitter’s
hook or a
singer’s
smile?
or maybe
the world
doesn’t dream
at all of
me
maybe the
world can’t fall
asleep;
a restless spirit,
all because of
the likes of
me
(inspired by Langston Hughes “I Dream of a World”)
