ill remember you laughing, dancing,
humming.
ill remember us laughing
all of the time.
they are waiting for some explanation. you have not a fuck to give, some sleight of hand, my dad’s birthday is june 27th you begin.
stutter something about switching places.
stutter something about ice.
stutter something about loss.
stutter, close your eyes,
watch a story fall out.
I’m not sorry.
you’ve been rehearsing it,
I’m not fucking sorry.
i cant even write about the last night, the dream the night you died. the tunnels and the ghosts in my apartment and the maze and me, distracted by the little girl. the warning true.
“grief is the price we pay for love”.
“But I can’t.”
“But you have to.”
and i think I may be
interminably detached from anyone
not blood,
but that ain’t the half of it.
y’all should know,
(so I’m writing it)
I don’t stand a chance against the curse
but I jump
once I hear the word
run.
to try.
I have never abandoned anyone.
“This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor
– then the letting go –”
–Emily Dickinson
IV. (home)
I tell them,
I am not writing about the men
you see unless it’s
my
dead dad
and
my
dead brother.
abandonment?
who me?
wearing my father’s knit
NY Giants cap and
bereaving, stripped,
replaying the final moment:
hand held, eye contact,
the knowing I had and decision
to forgo a flowery speech.
elision.
the last thing my father and I ever
said to each other was
I love you
before I left,
palms on the linoleum,
sobs held,
bargaining,
one more Christmas.
it’s brevity a poet seeks.
- (love)
and I think
I may be a masochist,
an undervalued trait of mine.
you are about five neighborhoods
away reading this and I
am heart felt, knee sunk
in one lost picture;
black and white snapshot
of the first rollercoaster I rode.
my father accompanied me,
and recalling when he went too
fast on the jet ski
knocking us both into the water,
two booming laughs,
it is the drugs that got us,
the suicide,
the dementia,
there’s nothing left.
but I held your hand in earnest
and exchanged a look.
I didn’t hug you during the
pandemic.
I try not to think
of these acts of
care as anything but that
but inconsolable,
bereft,
heavy cement cracked,
it comes for me as
failure.
II. (sadist)
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes–”
it’s in front of the Christmas tree
one week before you die,
alone and panicked by the
thought of mustering
staring at white frosted
plastic pine dotted with
uniform red balls
when I feel it.
it’s like cement cracking.
the ornaments of my childhood
all gone, lost
with my yearbooks and the
oil painting of mom
taken by the asbestos garage,
poverty; my enslaver.
i’ve been writing this for you
for about ten years
waiting for the day I’d be
by your bed to read the ending.
the bargaining begins.
(it’s just one breath)
this is where the poem begins.
- (dad)
when he said,
ok do it slower
schiiiizzzoooooaffffeeeeeective
i said,
that doesn’t explain any of the ghosts.
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