"cayenne" poems - Hello Poetry

and i am eleven again feeling like tomorrow is a couple yesterday's ago smothered in cayenne pepper hot enough to take off taste buds and tonight i am eating a meal only worth burning it tastes like my parents anniversary it tastes like a zinfandel left on the counter too long it's a bad story, see there's no silverware 'cause my mom sold it to keep the lights on and somewhere in heaven somebody in a suit doing commentary on this fiasco is telling someone else in a suit that "you have to eat love with your hands" so we sit, four plates on the table for the two of us my brother's long gone dad's even further away & he's not the one who's buried i carry both their names like anchors that i cannot unmoor from while she looks at the empty table and says something about the news she says something else but she's not talking we aren't proud of this, see my dad likes to wax his car he's proud of it and my mom says she sees a lot of him in my hands says, i touch the things i find like they didn't belong to people sleeping in the ground she says i touch photo albums the same way- you know, i never used to believe that history could repeat itself not until i could fast forward seventeen years and still wake up to smoke alarms how i would go into our kitchen to find it empty and the dinner smoldering & my mother in her bedroom looking through family photos like it's a just another summer day and the sirens are just the birds i don't ask, i never say a word in this moment i am an archeologist afraid to dig up the past cause history repeats itself- you see my brother is dead and my father is gone they have been for some years now and my mother sometimes forgets and sets their place at the table like they're still here and in the confusion ends up ankle deep in pictures of how it used to be she let's dinner burn and douses it in red pepper hoping i won't know the difference

0

Oct 10, 2014

Oct 10, 2014 at 6:42 PM UTC

TomLeveille

jamais vu

and i am eleven again feeling like tomorrow is a couple yesterday's ago smothered in cayenne pepper hot enough to take off taste buds and tonight i am eating a meal only worth burning it tastes like my parents anniversary it tastes like a zinfandel left on the counter too long it's a bad story, see there's no silverware 'cause my mom sold it to keep the lights on and somewhere in heaven somebody in a suit doing commentary on this fiasco is telling someone else in a suit that "you have to eat love with your hands" so we sit, four plates on the table for the two of us my brother's long gone dad's even further away & he's not the one who's buried i carry both their names like anchors that i cannot unmoor from while she looks at the empty table and says something about the news she says something else but she's not talking we aren't proud of this, see my dad likes to wax his car he's proud of it and my mom says she sees a lot of him in my hands says, i touch the things i find like they didn't belong to people sleeping in the ground she says i touch photo albums the same way- you know, i never used to believe that history could repeat itself not until i could fast forward seventeen years and still wake up to smoke alarms how i would go into our kitchen to find it empty and the dinner smoldering & my mother in her bedroom looking through family photos like it's a just another summer day and the sirens are just the birds i don't ask, i never say a word in this moment i am an archeologist afraid to dig up the past cause history repeats itself- you see my brother is dead and my father is gone they have been for some years now and my mother sometimes forgets and sets their place at the table like they're still here and in the confusion ends up ankle deep in pictures of how it used to be she let's dinner burn and douses it in red pepper hoping i won't know the difference