Psalm For A Ghost


Its in the translucent way you lay in your bed,
That you remain in our minds now-
Like a faded negative, silent reminder,

Of someone who once moved about this house.
In a stroke of genius, you were struck dumb,
In the elucidation of your illuminations.

Left to press into us, with the garbled litanies,
Of paralyzed tongues, refusing to ply
Our flesh, from the bone of your fingers;

Refusing to actually give up, and die.
Your balled fists push into eternity-
Beat back a little death from your

One-more-day; you insist is the only certainty.
The family corresponds it’s dismay
Of your victory, in reticent whispers;

Which crawl along the wall to dissipate-
Skirting the edge of your attenuated ears.
Careful not to disturb the phantoms

Of that solitude, who have become
Your only consistent conversations.
You don’t see, it is your own death,

That calms me, your refusal to actually
Lay-down-into, that gray box our hands
Fold over, like a prayer of our own salvation.

Allows me to know, when your curtain is called,
We will all slowly rise, bleary eyed,
With numb feet, and stumble towards the aisles.

Exhausted by the long predictable play,
Relieved once those weary dialogues have ended-
Once the distasteful scenery, has been wheeled away.

You revolve within your conflicted limbs,
As I sigh, admiring the tactful way,
The memories in your photographs fade.


__________________________


Mutely For Flowers


My father, separated,
By the birth of birth,
Who sits, tiredly melting

Into the crevices,
Of a fleshy chair.
Recanting his mute stories,

To a thousand passing flowers;
Who nod, stupidly in the rain.
Gently folding the ash

Of some cheap cigarette,
Like limp, white linens.
The opium aflame behind

His glass hollowed stare.
Blankly consuming the world,
Through the safety

Of his living room window.
Each day, he sits, and waits:
For God, or death;

Something more than eternity-
Or the flowers, to root,
Numbly along.

_______________________________


The Becoming


These living figures in my life
are dissolved, in transition.
Are involved, in becoming
by ceasing to be.

They strive toward equality
with the myriad faces
which populate an old tattered
shoe box.
Faces for whom I have no memory,
save those given me by the older
generations.

And here, in this room-
Amongst the binary drone of an
oxygen machine,
which rises and falls like the
distant throb of a riding mower,
shifting between two gears,
-Lies another member of this
slow progression.
Though she is running now,
breathing hard in a full sprint
towards her absolute resolution.

Her ragged breath grates the air,
scraping away at thirty-second
intervals, until we are
only left with her ruin;
and all the plans the week must see made-
And her husband frail and bruised,
weary with his relief of her passing.

This common plot devise
is so standard it has almost
become cliché.

We have congregated here
to witness
her final exit, to watch
the velvet curtains unfold,
obscuring the floor behind her.
-it’s as though they were selling
tickets down at the family trust-
Already her photos are among
the others
-In this one she is younger than
I am now and you can see the
beauty which I never knew her by-
The kodachrome merely waits
for her presence to eddy, for her
to become a face my unborn children
will never know
a series of stories
they’ll forget, despite being told
and retold.