on the night my uncle died, i prayed for the wrong person.

between the tears and the telephone static, his name was muffled, and i spent all night trying to save somebody who wasn't in danger.
and if god is real and a properly placed prayer can save a life,
then i am a murderer.
i was twelve. this poem isn't about me.
every poem i write is about me
(introspection is a nice term for narcissism),
but not this.

my uncle was fifty. he was a good man, gone too soon. it always seems like everybody is gone too soon,
i think when people die, everything that was bad about them is forgotten.
it eases the guilt of the living, i guess.
this poem is not about my uncle.

this poem is about my cousin.
my cousin found his father that night,
in a heap on the floor, convulsing.
he was 8, and he was bringing his father upstairs to tuck him in.
this poem is for matthew, who has difficulty speaking for himself,
because he screamed enough that night to last the rest of his life,
and maybe it's hard to dig up words without digging up memories.

this poem is for abandonment issues that will never have a chance for closure, and for the nightmares, and for two years of sleeping in his mom's bed to make sure she wasn't leaving too.
this is for too-young-to-understand, for every he's-just-gone-to-sleep.

young does not mean oblivious.

this is for every guilty thought that he will ever have. this is a poem to say that you couldn't have done anything. to say that you couldn't have known, that you couldn't have found him earlier and that it wouldn't have helped.
it broke my heart when you asked me to teach you CPR.
how you knew once you discovered the body he no longer occupied.
matt, i remember you saying that his eyes looked empty.
please don't remember them like that.
you were only eight.
he was only fifty.

i hope that you dont see his ghost everywhere,
i know you might.

on the night my uncle died, i prayed for the wrong person.