Given Up

That Saturday morning Dad went to rest
forever on his old bed
and that old mattress,
I was in the kitchen
cleaning the waffle iron.
It wasn’t as much a mess
As I was when I learned too late
He’d Gone

The heat of the Tucson sun
blasted through the dining window
scattering to the walls from the chandelier
turning the room into a frightening scene
of fleeing spirits rising
like lava lamp ghosts,
invisibly higher
and I wondered if the sun
could just be a crystal in
a bigger chandelier;
another light source behind it.

I cried in the closet that day
with the Samurai sword, old leather jacket,
boxing glove, and bowling ball.
The grief took me too hard
to realize that I now had to find homes
for all these orphaned possessions,
But not hard enough to realize
I would never find
home for myself again.

Shearing Skin

I had lost all hope

I was a fixture

a figment

a ligament contracted

in fists and fits

a misfit unfit

for fitting in

shearing skin

falsely thinking it let them in

 

 

Too grave to give

And given in

Gape gowned to the ghost

I gave way in ghastly grins

It sadly seeps and sways

In sweeps and says

“The cloth that hangs

Is wearing thin”

 

The naked haunt

Who has my heart

He harped and harked

Into the dark

So, to fall I followed

The invisible hollow

That fallow fellow

I met at my pillow

To pluck the plantation

Of flesh-cotton sorrow

 

No sheep can spin

That ripened skin

The fluffs of buff

I’ve given him

And gauged the girth

Of all his grim

On graveyard shifts

At the cotton gin

 

Of my frightly frocks

He dawned at dusk

I hemmed and hawed

“He has a husk!”

Hushed and hidden

Till head hits hay,

He woke me as I slipped away

 

Although remained in his remains

He reaps with me, now

In the rags of wraiths

And raves in tones of razor blades

Too visible to vanish

and too vanquished to be vain

 

We traipse along

the brim of night

showing our skin

Our dark burning bright

And haunt the fringe

of flocks in flight

 

and frighten the fowl

with hues and howls

how we flash and flaunt

our cacophonous cowls

and dive back to the morn’s burning sun

with jaundice yellow yowls

and our skin undone

 

Each midnight I mend

The shredded shroud

and cackle as I count it down

My hope, it seems

In seams, so soft

Are cloaks where I’m

no longer lost.

Addiction

Our congenital ghosts,

those haunting habits,

permeating every drop of DNA,

sprinkled with the crumbs

of our ancestor’s sins,

are difficult to cleave,

could make us bleed

centuries all at once.

Carving it out

is as immense a task

as retrieving past breaths

fooling death,

and choking elusive phantoms.

These family trees

with gilded limbs,

are wrought in cancerous desire,

bound in wires

mere mortals strive to prune.

Changing the course of fate

is a futile feat

but I’ve seen great men beat

these invisible wraiths.

To strangle an unseen foe

proves an eidolon from a hero.

I know there is power in you;

enough acid

creeping through your veins

to erase the possession,

and etch lessons,

you will never forget.