10 Things you should know about being a child growing up with a dying parent:

1. When you and your classmates are first learning how to read a dictionary, there will always be one word they don’t know: privacy. When they ask you where it is, you’ll be able to tell them that it’s the 29th word on the 925th page of a Merriam Webster dictionary published in the year 2001. But when you’ve given them all they asked, their favorite word will still be “public.”

2. The day you learn how to use the hospital equipment is the day you are no longer a child

3. You are born an adult. You come out of the womb with the intellect and physical ability to care for your family because that is what they need. You are a peasant child in the middle ages: work begins the day you are born and your job won’t stop till you are buried with her.

4. When you come back to school, people will develop a favorite phrase. It will be a 1 2 punch along with the word public: “How are you?” Tell them you’re ok. Tell them you are happy and glad you are back. Don’t tell them what you want to. That you are diagnosed with a sunken chest a hole over your heart. Don’t tell them you wish ******* was more available because hell: at least if your face is numb maybe you won’t cry as much.

5. Not everything needs a retaliation. See there was one time a kid walked up to me and asked if I was ok; I said go away; he said “You don’t get to be mad just because she’s dead.”

6. Anger. . .becomes tight fit clothing you never take off. You are a man created by the affectionate pages of Chinua Achebe: You “never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger” the problem is when you are only agry, Things always fall apart

7.  When they ask you if you are handling her death well, and you want to scream no blasting out the last breath you’ve held since she breathed her last! Don’t do anything but ask them if. . .

8. They ever knew her full name


9. As you walk through the halls of a high school building, be the dog that smells ignorance. When you hear those children tell you every part of their lives they struggle with, all the homework they have, the B’s they might get, the hangovers they get from drinking away their immaturity, tell them what it means to clash with your own mental composure. Tell them that. . .

10. You have been doing homework over a dying body for the better half of your life. Homework was the rock you leaned on because it was the only deadline you knew, Chemotherapy was the foundation of chemical equations, blood pressure was the only fractions you saw, your English vocab was the list of pain medications---

Life was a class on defusing bombs. . .and a flatline didn’t mean defused but at least the end was written in stone

I wish it were simple enough that I could cry
And stamp my feet at it,
let my eyes catch fire and my chest implode
To the beating of my agry fist.
Make there way the easy way,
but
I no more know there is a way
then I know there is a purpose.
Everything is a half shadow dripping from the elusive
And enigmatic nature of the unknown.
And you can not scream or stomp
At the silent,
Or the invisible,
You cannot pound your fist over a shadow,
You can’t bellow at the top of your lungs
Over things that reside under your own skin
And wreak havoc between the walls of your own head.

   If you have accompanied loneliness
   A little longer than bliss
   i have to remember your feeling this
   hell, you can sit here with the rest
   of us to attest
   to the greatest wall of them all,
              for a generation raised on the temptations
              of instant gratification,  
              throwing fits over adds
              aired on there favorite stations,
              we were never prepared to deal with
              overwhelming  alienation.
                        ­        I want to scream over
                                oceans of silence
                                not cheap ways to appease
                                desires  born
                                out of isolation
                                look into the pain of your eyes
                                and screech my defiance.
                                find a real friend in alliance.
                                in all the fast race days,
                                welling in pressure and change
                                          were forgetting our ways to find
                                          a person and stay.
                                          every one cries, screams and pleads
                                          every ones dieting and fighting
                                          wanting the exact same things
                                          every ones to busy walking away
                                          too look at each other
And whisper
"I want you to stay"

alternatively known as: trying to sober up... but keep on drinking.

i remember this time,
when a girl i was ******* slapped me
silly...
    because i assumely lied to her...
about getting a university degree...
and oh, what a pain that slap was,
given the ****** that came after.
throw a ******* penny into the fountain
for the last ten minutes i was trying
to sober-up,
      and yes, i was slapping myself
in the face... over 6ft...
     and weighing over 100 kilograms...
a slap by me... i felt it on my cheek...
i almost lost a tooth...
and i had a case for stating: my neck!
my neck!
         but you know what was
agry. puzzlig, painful?
        it wasn't the memory of being
slapped by a russian girlfriend,
and then her fetish for mirrors,
and how she loved looking at her herself
getting ****** in the mirrors...
oh... what an image to glare into...
            no, but i was slapped on cheek by her...
so today, i was reading the newspaper,
meaning: it was a *sunday...
    i started drinking, and then slapping
myself in the face...
      but that wasn't painful...
    what was? the magazine read the headline:
100 albums you have to hear
before you die...
     in the live rubric:
     stop making sense - talking heads,
mtv unplugged in new york - nirvana,
  1969 the velvet underground - the velvet undergroeund,
live at massey hall 1971 - neil young,
live! - bob marley and the wailers...
  now... slapping yourself in the face
to rememeber an ex-girlfriend is past painful...
it's just itchy...
         it's just an idea of a mosquito...
    you get used to it, like love might be compared to malaria,
you can take a hundred girls slapping
you in the face,
   after which you start slapping yourself
to estimate that 100 girls could slap you and
that you'd still **** them...
  what's painful? the 100 album playlist...
   what the **** happened to tom waits'
  live album         glitter & doom (live)...
which is akin to the doors', roadhouse blues
live...     i really would prefer to slap myself toward
a 1000 times silly... than excuse tom waits' album
not being mentioned in the century of
worthwhile albums...
    come on... live circus?!
          come on!              goin' out west?!
goin' out west live, is as good as the doors'
version of roadhouse blues!
the studio version doesn't match-up to it,
not even half as much!
      sometimes recording music, live,
      propagates the need for a judas...
                    you really need a thief somtimes...
i mean, sometimes the art-work comes with the audience,
rather than "claustrophobic", locked in a recording studio;
it's basically the energy, of the immediacy of feedback.

it always seems an attempt,
                 to tell the most expensive jokes...
the anti-taboo: there is no
                         taboo types of jokes,
   for a crumb of all possible
freedoms,
                    that exhausting crumb
   of  chit-chat...
                 for some reason birds
                 do it much better than we
do...
          if there's a reason to talk,
i.e. retort,
               then people talk...
   but to just simply talk...
           for one:
       i'd rather listen to music
and not exhaust my larynx...
   unless i'm not whistling or
humming or singing a song
on a mute button, but nonetheless
contorting my face to
imitate the words pouring into
my ears?
                 i find not reason to talk,
or protect the right to do so;
waste of a good silence,
     so much so that i might as well
be plagiarising kierkegaard...
  who said:
        people always worry about
their freedom to talk,
       never, their freedom to think;
after all, thought is the supreme
verb...
             yes, that ghost of a verb
attached to a body, easily
dismissed by atheists and materialists
as the non-existent soul...
      forget mental gymnastics
adding a comment to someone
talking...
     try mental yoga...
      stretch for a while...
       inhale something inconvenient,
and allow yourself to brush it
under a carpet, which later starts
to fly off, into a beautiful sunset...
  so, if there's a rhetorical question?
surely there must be a metaphorical
answer...
    do people feel comfortable
in each other's company when they
have to continue talking?
   or when they can sit in silence
   and feel no need to say anything?
by god,
    i had to adopt an old man's mentality
in my youth so many times,
    a year to me is like a lifetime,
  i watch the differences between
summer of one year, and summer
  of another,
   the same with winter...
   i try to summon the stereotype of
an agry youth,
     but after a while i'm exhausted
and just end up drinking ***
      and laughing into the night;
have i somewhere to be? someone to talk
to? something to see?
      something worthy my attention?
perhaps...
      perhaps this is a continental
   approach to an american "thing"...
   i remember the loudest ******* at school,
constantly ******,
   putting on airs, puffing up chests
toward a diatribe...
                            but god...
     it's like this cognitive-phobia invoked by
that need: for a security, of being able to
say whatever you want...
                   it's almost akin to being
claustrophobic, or ego-phobic?
   this need for a constant squash match,
to bounce off other people and then strut like
a peacock...
     no bear (esp. a polar) looks magnificent
in a zoo...
              the white turns to grey, from lying
around all day... sure... lions can be kept,
pandas too... lazy ***** that they are...
          i'd like to have coined a better compound
for those people who are so desperate to
speak... but find it horrifying to even think;
     how sad; how very sad.