Why shatter the window when my door is wide open?
Why shout with frustration when I'm standing right here?
Why plead so loudly when you have my attention?
Why slap me so hard when I'm wiping your tears?

I see you're so lost, I see you're so lonely
I feel your hot anger, I feel your deep fears
Whatever you do, even when you disown me
I'll sit here beside you, until the fog clears

I miss my mother most
when I'm in her frenetic company.
Such an angry fragile woman
in the shadow of the mum
she used to be.
Lost and alone, wanting a way home,
one woman against the world
with no old friends
only fresh new foes.

She can identify every shifting lie
sitting scared with no escape
from a hundred shifty eyes.
Stalkers criticise every mistake
watching her practice looping moves
cornering her as if to prove
that we're all conspiring
each trying to rob her
when the screaming truth here
is that her fleeting thoughts
have already gone where
we can never walk
not even in our tears.

What's the problem?
Root out psychic weakness for clarity.
Get a clue. Find fear with his pants pulled down.
Grease him up. Marvel at the grasp you have
When it is your grasp is cast. Take control.
Write it out. Of a pen, venom dipped, or on LCD.
Create targets. Release your load. Watch what
You thought killed you explode. Say your prayer.
Kiss dementia on the cheek. Find your tools
To craft relief, send your sinking self to sea
Sit on the water, in twilight above and far gone.
Wait for that bony fingered knock again,
That **** is infinitely recurrent.

I vowed to listen to all you speak of
Even amongst the hostile cold and unforgiving bleak
I stare into a face once full of love
That once made me weak

But now a stranger- l struggle with time  
Imagining you true to your once pretty sight
No longer mine, it has consumed your mind
No longer do you know my plight

How I wish you would come back to me
I can feel your body next to mine but it's not you
It is merely a shell of the person I once knew to be
So full of life, generous, caring and eyes so blue

Eyes now black cavernous caves
Empty and dark like pools of water
Reflecting life but never generating waves
Stagnant, festering, this is not fair

You have truly lost your mind and your soul
A shadow of what once was there
Ever taunting me with the memories it stole
Meaning you don't recognise me in your stare

Nothing will ever hurt me more than that
A lifetime torn apart by degradation and age
But you now are lost to me, yet cruelly in your seat you're sat
Your love for me lost: signifies the final stage

                                                                             -k.g.

Predicament of the zero hour
enabling brave or foolish decision
Even  mélange of both
Hitting home
physical structures oppose
Unfleshly
Holy Ghost takes over,
very much also  
Divinity and arousal

Only human
perched on brink of flight
dwelling is no perception
of freedom
Apprehending bigger picture
"To judge is not to love"
or something Mother Teresa said

When Pops referred to "The Bible"
it meant, bring him the sports page
Dichotomous our separate ways
revealing conscious decisions
Tridented a third eye  
When a vision of something further
sends to sentiment beyond
Cast and flung
Stealing home plate
and called, "Safe"
Pondering what only a god
may leverage

The world no longer fits.
Friends like fleece
Family like well worn wool
Triple wrapped for winter
Tea that's brewed stronger
None can now heal her

A smile to light the day
A hug to last the night
A keeper of peace
And ender of fights.

The world ill fits her
Her anchor won't hold any longer
She's lost and bewildered
No longer graceful as she grows older
And there's only this frail shadow
Of the woman I still ache to know
Mum, I miss you
Where have you gone to?

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.