Paint with red creation,
white skin tightened grip.
She's grown too sharp with patience;
a ***** to let it in.

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
(I'll say the rest is due.)

The good men all are taken,
they've taken 'til it's gone.
Sordid imagination,
is this the man you want?

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
I'll say the rest is due.

The spiral down.
The leaking of pocketed things
swirling above towards sunlight:
3D text of a spilled life.

What you did.
Who you loved.
The things you ate and the things that ate you up.

Awakening in reverse.
A return to the obscurity from which you were born.

The sea keeps no record,
marks nothing in stone,
but sings a eulogy for everyone ever lost to it
heard from any coast.

If my life were less interesting,
would you be less interested in it?
Or me?

Four magenta rings, sheathed in jellied casing,
floating between the rocks.

I popped mine on a barnacle - went backwards too fast.
Barely made it to shore before it was nothing but a limp piece of rubber.

The young ones are out there tossing them around.
Mounds of translucent flesh passed from hand to hand.
Touched, squeezed, pressed; watch this trick.

Harmless, they assure me. I'm less convinced.

On the beach, I find one alone.
No color to it.
A prodding finger.
Soft sensation.
A giving way.

Dumb mass of cells.

Not the product nor conclusion, but the case that merely holds it.
The theory that posits without endeavoring to ever actually prove it.
You are but the hook, the hanger, the mannequin that displays the lifestyle you'll never have the courage to actually wear outside the store that made it.
Doomed to hide in other peoples' lives.
Relishing the moments when someone else is reflected in the mirror.

Soft-wedged between twin expanses of amber sky,
the lemon form of the most delicate cloud I've ever seen:
ripples of cotton billows in purest white
floating high above my supine body.

Barely held within, the coalescing vapors of an imminent torrent;
a secret shower to which I am the sole divulgent.

To the south, a tower stands *****, twitching in the wind as if with anticipation. Its weather beacon gleams with a pattern indicating a sudden downpour.

Oh, dear gossamer form of cotton sweetness, how you swell and darken, distending pregnant with your promised release.
From white to translucent as the first drops can be seen,
granting a coveted glance of the inner-workings to mother nature's daily intimacies.

Drenching me in bliss that stings and blinds.
Purifying this ***** earth by choking out every stray flying thing that exists between you and me.
Mouth agape and mind blank like fowl that can't help themselves from looking away,
drowning on one divine mouthful.

No, I wasn't thinking about what tomorrow is, or her, when I called you. (If you couldn't tell from me not mentioning it.)
I was just glad to finally catch you at a decent hour, to hear about how you've been doing; to hear about how your daughters have been doing.

To be honest, I didn't even know that day was coming up.
I'm still trying to catch dad at a decent hour to wish him a happy belated. (That's been my parental focus lately.)
As for tomorrow, well, I've never really cared for that particular day, or her, to be honest.
(You already know this.)

I never did tell you how beautiful I thought your eulogy was.
I thought about it for months (years) afterwards.
How you somehow managed to only focus on the good, or, no, that's not quite right.
Rather, how you managed to make all the bad somehow seem not so bad. As if our lives had been enriched, rather than impoverished by it. But like, it wasn't even a trick, spun by some spin artist.  
It was genuine, and a testament to your ability to forgive,
and with you being the eldest, and having received the brunt of it . . .  
I just thought, you know, like, maybe . . .
well, you know, maybe I have told you already how beautiful I thought it was.

Sometimes, I think of responses to things, or things I'll say to people in my head (over and over again,) but then I forget whether or not I ever got around to actually saying them to the person I intended to.
Sometimes, I say them to someone else instead.
Or else, I say them to the person I meant to, but forget that it's already been said,
and so I say it to them over and over again.
Hammering them over the head with repetition upon repetition on repetitive hammering hits on the head, over and over again -
deaf to whatever they might have said in response or defense.

Sometimes, I fear, I'm turning into our mother, in that sense.