A Vase

Flowers

carelessly fall from your lips

they land

on my heart

in pieces

But some....







Some I hold in my hand

caressing the petals with unfeeling fingers

not knowing if they are real,

I pull them

one by one.

I inhale deeply their sweet scent.

A seduction of life anew

drifts passed my haunted memories

making even those smell sweet.



you love me

you love me not



until nothing

is left

but stamen and pistil

as another spoken word like a flower picked,

dances on your bottom lip

threatening

to curl it's sweet scent around my neck

like a noose it chokes out

reality

until I can't hear anything

more than

a bouquet of

"I love you"

that fills me

fragile, hollow.

A vase,

wishing it were soil

to nourish

what you said.

A Fifty Cent Mystery

I stopped by to see you yesterday after I visited Dad. Everytime I do I have this image in my mind of what it will be like when I get there. I see some melodramatic scene where I throw my self across yours, moms, and Marty's graves. I would lay there until all the grief, sorrow and every bad memory that permeates my being would somehow spill out of me and seep threw the earth to water your bones, and in the grave they would stay where they belong. Things never quite work out the way we imagine they will though do they? What happens when I get there usually goes something like this....I approach the grave and I can no longer distinguish the three of you as individuals. You are all one and when I visit, I visit all of you, though I no longer feel your presence there. I see my last name sprawled across three stones and I know a part of who I am resides there with all of you, just as a part of you resides inside of me. The closer I get the more I shut down and the Academy Award movie clip in my mind turns into nothing more that me pulling weeds, looking at the faded photos of you on the granite picture frame and I wonder who was here last. The sensation that it was someone else who survived all of this death extends it's hand, and like a traitor I willingly climb into its palm. It's too much to bear. It always has been, but at times...times like right now, thoughts of you stream down my face. That imaginary hand that held me is gone, and the deferred payment of pain is made from an overdrawn account. What remains of you is .50 cents left on your head stone and a vastness that grows inside of me....knowing that there was more of you that I didn't know than did, and for this I am sorry.