Tag: death

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Bow to Mystery

I went looking for my calling 

until my calling found me 

but forgot my name.

Before I could hear, 

I wanted to be a 

journalist,

teacher, 

biologist,

writer,

mommy, 

dancer, 

artist, 

dragon, 

nurse, 

sociologist,

tightrope walker, 

doctor 

and boy.

A few wishes called to me 

and a few I summoned once 

on a boring Tuesday afternoon, 

or was it Wednesday?

Days go nameless 

when your suit does not fit (unfit), 

your business is none of yours, 

and your words remind you 

of the unspecified advice 

given by that unnamed source 

on a forgotten date or 

something someone once said or 

letters you read in a book.

Endeavoring turned out a total bust, 

all that flapping and folding 

just to breathe the same air we all do 

and  always have since birth.

And after so much wind, 

when good fortune dropped in my lap, 

I turned to the skies looking for the bird.

Where does all the world’s blindness come from?

“Who created the creator?” my father asked, 

surprising me with the quality of the question. 

We all were.

But the truth is, 

the laurel crowns all word-walkers emerging open-eyed 

envisioning the final curtain call 

–as if there were a stage. 

I bow to mystery. 

  
 

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Cryogenically Yours

 

 
“Wait, Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen, right?”

(We are in the car.) 

“No, I think that is just rumor, one that’s been around forever.”

“Really? Because I think he actually was frozen.”

“Look it up. You have a phone.”

“Oh look, ‘Disney on Ice’ it says, so it’s true, right? Wait, that’s a joke isn’t it? Oh shit, he was cremated.”

“Yep. Hard to freeze ashes.”

“When I go I’m going to be cremated and have someone throw my ashes in Harry Styles’ hair.”

“Um…you better put that in your will, so that your ash delivery person can justify throwing your dead-ass ashes in the man’s hair. And so he’ll feel bad enough to allow it since he will feel compelled to  honor someone’s dying wish. Bet that would go viral on Twitter.”

(high pitched laughing) “That’s a great idea! It would so work!!”

(SMH, eyes on the road ahead)

 

credit: http://www.flinthosts.co.uk

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Gemini 

 

 
Gemini’s bloom, neither starry aster nor royal poinsettia

seasons too late for the rose of summer skies.

One dies brightly, late fall’s supernova, while another paints icy lips ruby.

Your velvet blush pairs story-eyed girls with breathless boys re-enacting everlasting joy;

unrevealed how your Bristly Roseslug Cladius difformis and red spider mite underside,

 laced and aching,   

cache closes the thin divine like children threading hearts to paper clips in kinder class.

Honored sister, pour your swooning sorrow into my hands and let your brave face die.

No man, beast or garden silk delivered so much to so many for so long. 

Release the weight of your beatific crown, heavy with curved care, and sink.

Another June will call your name in vein-flow some day soon.

 
credit: flikr.com

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Post Matris Vitae

 

 
And I thought to myself, “Where shall we bury her?”

Startled by the sheer absence of an idea, I winced.
Those who never come to see her haven’t a notion

or they would have asked at Thanksgiving dinner.
We buried her so long ago somehow yet there it is,

the question of her final resting place looming large.
A few weeks will bring another birthday celebration

that she passes unaware of her previous 77 years.
And she, stuffed in a back room while we all feasted,

the family she grew and fostered, living as if we know.
Did anyone see her in the shadows of her own wake?

Will anyone mourn the body’s cease post matris vitae?

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Bicycle Down

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Why do I want to know that a bicyclist was killed by a hit and run driver way up north in the state somewhere, some place that may as well be Mars for all it has to do with me?

Shouldn’t the news delivered to my phone via text be something more urgent, more relevant like, “nuclear bomb just dropped in Los Angeles” or “meteor headed to earth in about an hour,” something more significant, enough to sound the incoming text alarm and make me look?

A bicyclist down hundreds of miles away.

Well, no doubt it’s a shame, and I can go there with my heart and my mind, that place of family grief and loss, and I can make it my own, especially now that I have a more specific piece of death than people dying everywhere every minute.

But it’s still too far for me to muster up the feels, the agony of killing me pain in the heart over losing someone I love.

Why do I want to be there when I don’t have to be?

And this is how we operate 9 times out of 10 of any given day.

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In which we bow and break in bearing it

 
 
It’s five minutes before class begins and one student, a mousy girl who twitches occasionally and whispers answers to my questions after I respond to her half-mast upraised tentative hand that must be propped up by the other hand in order to give it any height, says, “I think no one’s here because of the shooting.”
 
The classroom is one third full, not unusual for the hour and time in the semester, about one third of the way through. 
 
I wanted to doff off her suggestion as somewhat silly or illogical to assure her, actually, but as is always the case in teaching college students–or any students–sensitivity is paramount, so I pause a complete second. But in drawing up my response, I immediately flash angrily, “No, probably not. Why wouldn’t they be used to this sort of news by now? After all, mass shootings happen every other day now. It’s just become the new normal.”
 
I immediately regret my callousness.
 
This student has confessed in her second essay written for this class that she suffers from epilepsy, a recent discovery that has left her to picking up pieces, rescuing remnants of her former life that held nothing but unfettered future, the worst day up until then being when an elementary school kid called her a mop-head. She told me her medication affects her memory, slows her.
 
When she confided in me, I thought of my daughter in college two states north from home. She suffers from a recent sport-inflicted concussion, confused and depressed, her mind sluggish and stalling–going on too long now. She fears. I fear.
 
******
Last week at the head of the classroom, I repeated the line from a prose poem assigned for that day, “In the end, we are alone in the house of the heart.” I then asked the students if they thought that was true. Some thought so. Most did not know.
 
I offered my story of watching a cancer patient die, slowly, how, after months of gathering her family around her, then one by one sending each off not to return to her as she got sicker, she hunkered down inside herself the last three weeks, doing the difficult work of dying. It certainly looked like no one could help her do it, that she had to do it alone. To further illustrate, I likened that aloneness to being elbowed in the diaphragm, down on the soccer field, fighting for air. All of the hovering bodies above you as you lie on the ground can do nothing for you–you don’t even see them–as you fight the pain and fear of never breathing, diving deeply inside yourself for that will to bear it, to survive or brave surrender.
 
I thought the dying example was illustrative, poignant. Some stared in reflection, some in emergency-broadcast-test-pattern mode, others in churning liquid emotion. One young man gripped his head in his hands, face hidden, staring down the sheen of the teflon coated desk.
 
My heart winced.

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Mistress Humor

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Credit: http://www.victorianweb.org

Two Ladies Talking in Heaven

1st woman: Hi! Carol,

2nd woman: Hi! Sylvia. How’d you die?

1st woman: I froze to death.

2nd woman: How horrible!

1st woman: It wasn’t so bad…. After I quit shaking from the cold, I began to get warm & sleepy, and finally died a peaceful death. What about you?

2nd woman: I died of a massive heart attack. I suspected that my husband was cheating, so I came home early to catch him in the act. But instead, I found him all by himself in the den watching TV.

1st woman: So, what happened?

2nd woman: I was so sure there was another woman there somewhere that I started running all over the house looking. I ran up into the attic and searched, and down into the basement. Then I went through every closet and checked under all the beds. I kept this up until I had looked everywhere, and finally I became so exhausted that I just keeled over with a heart attack and died.

1st woman: Too bad you didn’t look in the freezer—we’d both still be alive.

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A Mother’s Birthing Flight

  
credit: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/03_04/lonelyDM2803_468x562.jpg



On a late Sunday she was born early
her mother in teary wondered weary
looked her in the eye and challenged
“Grow stronger and quicker than me
and don’t ever take nobody’s charity.”


Then she laid her baby down to die
her own ailing heart beat-less inside
but that baby survived, grew round,
fed by couple-strife seeking solution, 
by priestly advice for consummation.


“Raise a child in charity’s appearance
and through her grow into one; hence
your conflicts will vanish in loving care
when hours turn into decades quickly
and so save a loving vow’s guarantee.”   


Today she sits on a birthday morning
and stares at the street cars passing,
no one stopping by for cake and gifts;
she regarding the hours of a first light
contemplates a mother’s birthing flight.


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The Ache of Decay: a Eulogy for a Friend

  

Though you have softly haunted me in the last 37 years,
your disappearance a mystery and logical consequence 
at the same time, last night you pulled me aground to you
reaching out with a bony grasp I could not escape to run
just as you did on your very last day when evil found you
a fair haired lovely of kind eyes and dulled senses drifting.


Why did no one know your name to pin a tag to your toe?
Where were your broken hearted mother and brothers?
The 70s dichotomy, full of marauding psychotics and love
free spirits and walking malignant tumorous contagion too.
I had seen you last on Venice Beach sidling ocean waves
from a distance as we smoked and sang a freedom song.


All was light then and love searching, seeking–a dreaming.
No one could hold you down but what roots had you then?
Did you have a father and did your mother try to keep you?
I barely knew you as a latecomer to my hey day pre-parting.
Part of my flowering teenage society in full bloom just then,
I had to leave for another coast and on a whim you did too.


I remember you cooked enchiladas in a pan for us one day
and I had never eaten anything called Mexican food before.
My mouth burned, tentative tongue swimming in odd spices.
You brought the sun and a recipe home from your California.
You, who wore brown suede moccasin boots fringed in love,
a traveling spirit of unleashed, unending desire to live freely.


Restless and fiercely unleashed you were locked in impulse
and the lull of hazy high of whatever was passed your way.
No trace of fear or caution, you were a stretch for my wary.
You sat down to pilot life and enjoyed the height of clouds
while I was the lip biting pumping hearted passenger blind.
Like the wind you caught to fly, you passed on through me.


But today you seep in my bones and pinch my thoughts dry.
It could have been me or my daughters or sisters strangled
the hands of murderous savagery abysmally wide tentacled.
Insatiable lust for life you had matched his in mass murders.
A rover like you searching, seeking and finding youth’s sins
road-songs of impenetrable lightness against a dark’s deep.  


No one completes you, a part of the composite space-time.
A forever child will never know the truth of scarred wisdom
the full compendium peace of surrender that is not defeat
like we thought it was burning out not burning through it all.
A chip of the cosmos, all we ever were and will be for now
I know you sign the silent words to me in my restless sleep.


Your human traces tattoo synaptic sheathed memory’s skin
recombinatory particulate ossified bone and detrital kindred
melding in minds where curiosity, fear and mortal angst sit.
Those who carry you bouyant as your spirit ever was and is
float a child’s bay abutting the seas of misfortune and strife
smiling liberation song’s perpetually moving feet of hunger.    


Remains do not matter, mere material remnants of a body,
a shell symbol of connection to a race of radical reactivity.
Bury you deep in soil of your mother that earth never held;
no soul or idea chained you to the moment of your making.
No touch of a hand or kiss on the nape of your neck stilled
spirit so wildly untethered attached only to windless decay.


Held in a life loss unspoken, unnamed too long unknown,
torch carrying family and friends, acquainted to a tragedy,
oh murderous mistress memory mine let her flee binding;
devotional clinging was never hers to believe such perqs.
Only mask rivulet stain of stony faces crusted in creases
wipe ache from ears of those who never heard her cries.
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There is a Leaving

  

credit:  https://timrwalls.files.wordpress.com


There is a leaving that must be done
everyone knows when that it is too
when the pastels of the sky deepen
at dusk and pink becomes orange-red
a time when the ending paints true
the beginning and hope is contained
in darkness.

There is a leaving that must be done
when fall leaves and winter begins
a dying that prefigures anew the new
the hatchlings of sea turtles and fins
of mermaids spied prancing the deep
in imagination veered round the din
of darkness.

There is a leaving that must be done
when the face utters no more sighs
and a voice thinly reaches a mind’s ear
for none but the countryside cottages 
of someday adorned remain in dreams
plans of then dissolving soon too to
the darkness.
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