I sat by his bedside the day my father died.
The cancer that had riddled his body and soul now had complete control.

He fought kicking and screaming
the night the men in white came to take him on his final journey
like a great wildebeest struggling to get up on its front legs after being taken down by young lions. The way so many had said he
probably would since he fought his way tooth & nail throughout his life from the very beginning.

That night I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed staring out the huge ceiling to floor window of the medical centre at the many worlds hidden beneath thousands of rows of stationary lights and fluid winding rows of transient lights in-between and thought how the light of this window is just one of many thousands.

At that moment it seemed more like just one tiny speck in the vast star fields worlds above this city of light.

My father had spent most of his life just a short six-mile drive from here under the scattered lights of his hometown.

He turned to me and asked,
“That’s a big city. Where are we?"

Dementia had claimed his mind ten or more years earlier. It
slowly wound its way around his brain like a cocky snake
handler being choked by a boa constrictor unawares.

It seemed like it all caught up to his body. But it was good to see much of the bitterness and bad blood between us dissipated over the past decade.

On that night compassion ruled the day.

I could not say it then but it has been many years, where it seems compassion has forged with objectivity.

In a lucid moment he looked around the hospital room
bewildered as if he were a little boy who just woke up from a bad dream and asked,
“How did this ever happen?"
If only I could have told him.

Sometimes the truth cannot be spoken or heard. All I could do then was sit by his bed and lean in close to his ear and sing softly his favourite hymns. 

By morning his lifeless
dilapidated body lay in the fetal position. His once ravenous mouth now forever frozen looked like a knothole in a twisted cedar tree.

All I can do now is hang my head and think of how weak and frail we humans truly are.

Like compassion forged with objectivity, weakness and frailty forges with fleeting moments of strength. We forge heroes out of these moments to tower above
the pedestals the former is made of to somehow minimize the pain of this often denied truth.

There's a lot left to say;
Not a lot of time to say.
I'll be dead before I'm 30,
And I wish I could stay.

I have given you all of my heart,
For I have loved you from the start.
Your eyes look through my soul,
You see your name on my heart.

I don't know when, where, or why.
I know one day we'll be together.
I don't know how long, but I'm sorry
That you'll have to live with losing me.

Madness proves timeless

A fun house complex for the blitzkrieg

ticking my clockwork with an organic benevolence

It echoes nonsense

a pinball malfunction

Deafening in spaces fully saturated with silence

Don't bother with the pleasantries

My disappointment is not rooted in your confusion

More so inside this pine box called home

inside these ghosts so composed

Hardwood floors and wanting walls

Made bare by minds unable to sow a silver lining

The fruit strip wallpaper lacks a ***** Wonka ingenuity

I gag and smile for the Wilder man now sky strapped

Don't look for a cohesive culture

I retired them with the rest of my favorite functions

they always proved elusive and I always moved nothing

In need of a constant state of awe

No virtual vulture can swoon and pick the best wonder

Common ground under dead satellite sky

A trusted system as we ascend

Cosmic cluttered hibernation for your despondency

A distant sigh suggest no clear conclusion

An earthly scene repeats

slow blue with the newest gizmo

Conflict always comes

What's your remedy?

Where's your memory?

claim another sunset like we still move between black and white wonders

grab another sequence because the last one needs conviction

I needed this room for composure

I needed a stranger way for clarity

Somehow I ended up here with you and these contorted spaces

This lack of grace you convey is the reason I left earth in the first place