When you live with someone who has Alzheimer’s
your house feels haunted

Mostly at night

Only ghosts wander like that

            So aimlessly

It is metal pounding in the garage
a knife in my hand
and the deep breathed fear of

         What’s behind door number 2

It is him halfway inside a dryer

             Trying to get out

I sleep with my door open
listen carefully like a ghost hunter
for the way he haunts the halls
for the soft pat of skin on tile collapse
fnd the moaning

I carry him to the bathroom

He is the heaviest ghost ever

              A different kind of dead weight

I light him a cigarette
The cherry glows red in the dark
The tobacco crackles with each puff

He calls me nurse
calls me some other name
one I’ve never heard before

He is just practicing

                  It is hard to be good at being so lost

Even now that I am a man
he still scares me
scares me differently

Startles me in the dark
comes around corners
crawls on the floor towards me

              I am not always ready for that

Before

He scared me
the way a feral dog scares living food
A certain kind of animal inside of him

Now he isn’t so wild

           Taming takes so much away

He is dark spots on tan paper
crusted blood on nose and head
yellow ET cigarette stained fingertips

                He is me in thirty years

He is barbiturate slack jaw
Forward lean balance struggle

And at night he is so much a ghost
I forget about his good days and wonder

               What’s the point?

My house is haunted
by a man who has never not gone
Bump in the night