How seldom do we get the point,
do we make sense of those things we tend to avoid
and never conquer. We walk through the shadow
of the past and wonder why we're so afraid to look back.
Clarity, that's what we need as the years pile up
like some head on collision.
Steer us further from the closest exit,
from the point of no return until
there is no looking back any more.
Set us free
In this life, of this life, the only one I know.

I stood before you like a child who could not comprehend your pain,
your desperation, your plea for release.
Who wouldn't understand your inability to let go, to concede,
to accept the doctor's hardly indirect question that you are ready
for the netherworld, that negative space, that parallel universe
we'll never know but are destined for?

How could you? No one is prepared for that. But your eyes pleading
while your heart could not let go were convincing enough for that
indelible signature when for a split second we wondered if we were ready, knew we weren't, knew we never would be.

Goodbye dear mother. How can it be a year to the day tomorrow?
How can it be that long that we haven't spoken, haven't argued, got
pissed off about politics or the state of the world?

I am in your likeness you and then again me
and I feel one layer less, that vacancy, that minor to the major.
But I promise in the days ahead,
the weeks, months and years,
I will try to release you.

All my love.

No tag necessary. You're at the bottom of the pit, baby. Nowhere. You're consumed by you. There is no place other than that big black hole that sucked you in. You are hopelessness, relentlessness, redundancy, the merde you step in. You relieve yourself too often. 

24 hours to the day we had that talk, you and me. The one I always dreaded, the one you never wanted to have but always tried to. What constitutes the end, the life force, exactly what is it you're going to give up? Of course, I didn't have the answer and you didn't ask the question and somehow all of a sudden we were having this conversation that was so final, so irreversible, so irreconciliable. How can you have a conversation like that with your parent, with the one who gave birth to you? With no conclusion, only silence that is deafening and then the knowing. Of the end. To this day I can't totally accept it but I will try and keep on trying and that's all I can ask for. To you, mother of my invention, to you, my love always. 

The stillness of the thought, vibration aside, the wave, the crest, the cadence
and then the fall. The layers, the light, the prism, the circumstance. The bats, the knives, the guns, the pop culture decimating everything in sight. The stillness of the thought.

Just yesterday we walked down Highland Avenue wondering if we'd ever get there but not really caring. Those languid summer nights when the future was left to the imagination. Knowing we walked down that street together and smelled those magnolia blossoms and ran our hands across your bald head, feeling the soft courseness of new growth. That's all, dad. The love, the need, the possibility. The eternal walk. Down the street that matters.