Friday, September 26, 2014

Seasons of love













Why do I feel sad
when I hear you are leaving us
when I haven't really cared much
about what was going on with you
in many, many years because of
the unacknowledged tandem role you had
in the traumas of childhood?
The grieving is more likely about
the end of an era
the final death of a generation
time's evanescence
the false stories of faded eras
the never-to-be healed actions and
justifications of crazy, evil behaviors,
my mother's parents vanishing
at last. The past will just never
get better, will it?
As you slip quietly out through sleep,
I think of you and wonder
what it would have been like
to have a cookie-baking grandma
with a toss-you-in-the-air-squealing
grandpa, instead of the
dishonest molesting freaks
that comprise my genetic upline.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Dreamlands

In a chimerical maelstrom
two children
a baby boy and a toddler girl
pawns in a power play
between strange foreign adults
and their putative mother

Motel rooms flash by
wet towel heaps and
scattered toy deserts
Crammed elevators
Menacing conversations
ambiguous menace
Papers inscribed by
malignant forces and a
helpless parent

The boy disappears
if he ever really was
and the girl is mourned
her destiny putative and
vaguely dangerous
as the mother tries to
move forward
weeping over the
vagaries of ending

when

the girl bursts through
the door of a cold fireplace
mummified and mute but
squirming towards freedom
inching slowly and furiously out
of the cocoon of disregard and
powerlessness and
abandonment
to fly to the
arms of the one who
sadly missed her,
welcomed and
fiercely cherished
all the more
for having been
thought lost.