Cheers!
I propose a toast to the pink elephant in the room, that with the encroaching darkness ******* lightly across his abdomen, seeping through kidneys and out, out, through veins unaware that they are carrying their own demise.
Cheers to you!
Every time I see you, the chasm in my heart gets just a bit bigger.
And she, darling companion, falls deeper. So now she’s submerged in this canyon-- something sickly beautiful, said to be carved from glacial ice thousands of years before.
She’s irritating the muscle,
tiny toes picking off bits of scabs just beginning to heal.
And then I see you once more.
Cheers to you!
You’re in the center of this pyramid. You hold your wife above, your son and younger daughter beside you, an arm around each. Buy she lies below, unknowingly wait for all of this to fall on her.
You balance my life on this precipice. Doom sleeps on either side. I’ll fall slowly to the left, wake the monster. It’s barbs will dig through flesh and I’ll stand-- an audience member.
You’ve grown too skinny, turned so pale. I wonder if your veins have grown dark as you’ve become accustomed to carrying poison meant to **** it before it kills you.
Cheers to you!
You who wont, can’t, end the world.
I pull myself up and out—emerge from my rabbit hole of ignorance.
I have this fear of the cutting edge of dragonfly wings-
How unoriginal.
We all let the hollow swallow us cleanly down, almost forgetting the tiny
pebble- bringer of doom and resident of the gizzard- we will most certainly meet in the course of our journey.
I get sent secret messages of affliction—a disheartened face here, the nervous twiddling of thumbs there. Secret, I say, as they appear of fog and disappear with the flutter of an eyelash. They’re all my own, sent with sonar like that of the blue whale.
One looks born of red, achieving different color as eyes move inward. A girl wearing a Parisian hat and a scream that’s almost silent. Another comes silently during a drive, more sensation than image. Everything slows. It’s hard to conjure words, to make the right motions.
I’m reminded that life is a paint palate, a measure of darkness. I know there are people much farther along than you and I.
Cheers to you!
Being submerged in pain makes a person different.
Born of loss, causing loss-- pain never really disappears.
Sore that festers, oozes, scabs, gets torn open.
Cheers!
Raise your glass as I speak so quietly, I can only hope
You’ll hear this from across the room.
Raise your glass to the memories I have of your hair- now reduced to silvery down- your strength.
Raise your glass to your daughters, your son, your wife. I think you know I cry for them—not you. Two girls. One living in two worlds- mine and a world of parties and experimentation. The other so smart and so repressed. One boy. Unbeknownst to him, he won’t know how to proceed without a father figure-figure father. Unbeknownst to him, he’ll have to proceed without. A woman. She’s lost in this never ending labyrinth of test results; given too many choices when there should only be left or right. And yet, she’s not ready for it to end.
Raise your glass to Insanity, the mother of Brilliance! Endurance, the daughter of pain.
Cheers.
This poem was inspired by Josh Boyd's performance poem "Dolls in a Dolmen."