myworld413

[myworld413]

september 15th

when i am upset i want to play racing games. i hurt my hands. heart racing like it was real. spent the better part of this morning tossing and turning. had a long dream that seeped into the room, like the people were there beside me stroking my hair. up and brushed my teeth. had a bowl of cereal and some cheese. we were going to go to campus today so i had al try and get the mats from my head. there was an awful one right at the nape of my neck. i can feel that so much of my hair is dead. it made me cry and bust everything all open again. i don’t have the braves to do much of anything. when my mother saw my messages about not being able to sleep she offered me pills instead of comfort. how can anybody give something they do not have for themselves? for example: racing games come from my father. i think when his mind is dead and gone his fingers will still move button-to-button. pills and games do the same thing. different strokes for different folks but we all want to be numb to our pains. makes me feel better but it hurts my body when i get into it. it’s too real for me. up on my haunches. when i lose in a racing game i feel worthless. it is absurd. but i like to run, and even more than that i like to win. with my hair pulled out. imagining my mother berating me from behind with a brush in her fist. time is long and painful. i could not convince myself to leave the house.

#daily

[myworld413]

i waited and she did

#i always wait five more #posts

[myworld413]

she read it and didn’t say anything else

#:( #posts #i will go to sleep

[myworld413]

i can’t go to sleep because i want my mom to say, bug! why are you up so late! are you feeling upset? and i can’t go to sleep until she notices there is something wrong with me. this is the oldest story in my life. five more minutes, im always telling myself. ill give her five more minutes to hear my heart twisting. it’s been a long few years especially. not a lot of sleep happening

#posts #she has every right to be upset in her own way and forget me #but i have no family at all. grieve solitary and you turn into a monster

[myworld413]

poem for my grandfather

Riding into rain-clouds.

Passing cash under

the table. Coughing the smoke.

Putting out the stable.

Chasing the chickens

across the town. Hanging

on the phone. Putting us into

your rowboat. The flood

floating us home. April

bleating from the bed of

the truck. Poker, Rummy,

pockets of luck. Cancer.

Denim. Blood and gin.

Prine and Cash. You always

win. Christmas cactus,

Sunny, and Red. I want to,

I want to, want to be dead.

I went uptown to say my goodbyes.

You died right there, don’t-know-how-many

times. Perked up like God then.

Back on your feet. Never down,

always up, shiny and sweet.

Go and die, you beater. Sick

from drinking scotch. I do

not forget you, grandfather.

But they’re changing out your locks.

When morning comes I know that

they’ll be breaking all the clocks.

I should have known your death

was coming, ‘cause I’m

wearing through my socks.

#grief #poetry

[myworld413]

september 14

does my family think of me? that is a good question to start with. did my grandfather remember my face, among the crowd of nineteen grandchildren, as he was passing? or in the day prior? the year? as he discontinued treatment did he imagine a still image of his family, and was i in this photograph? i think this is relevant though i understand it is selfish. i think of death as a door always above me. i know you and i am afraid. i have watched you close and open and eat at my life. but there are others who knew the dead as brothers and sisters. as children. they do not like my watching. stay out of this death! it isn’t yours! i fall over. i despair. the truth is that death has touched me and i wish it hadn’t. even if my stepfather had forgotten me when he died, i had not forgotten him. i wept among his family until i didn’t. blood matters to people. i’ve been exiled at the edge of my family - in many ways my own fault - but have not grown a new family. there is still the only place i belong. and he was the only grandfather i ever had - if you forget the one that jumped onto the freeway, swung through my death-door five years back. i do not forget him. he burns in my eyes. i said goodbye to my sick grandfather so many times but this time i did not jump. across the world, unknowing, i sat on a bench and cried senseless tears. i feel like if i don’t go this time, it’ll be the one time he actually dies, i said. oh, said al. it’ll be okay.

i have been crying for him. i remember much of him. thinking about his burning barn, his seeing-eye goat, his joyful tricks, his tunes. you’re a teacher, he said, when last i saw him. but i can’t remember what else. he was small this last year. nothing like the god i’d known before. i can’t get myself to forget all the places i failed to show up. running all the time from my family. nowhere in the archives can you find my name. i scratched myself out and now i wish i had stayed. now that my grandfather has died everyone is telling stories. and you were there, and you were there, and you were there! it makes me smile. and i was there, i want to say. do you remember me? it’s okay. look at me - i live. made the bed for myself. but grief, this ugly thing. sets me on the floor. communal howling inside and there is no community that would take me. nineteen unnamed grandchildren, says the obituary and i don’t think i could name you them. cruelty for cruelty. shame for shame. when they cast out my mother, they sent me away. and i remember listening, little, to the ways they condemned her. how sick it was that she had put me in harm's way. but i went years without seeing their faces. couldn’t they have come to find me? if it was so wrong how i’d been left? i don’t know. sitting in my memory, i just don’t know.

#grief #daily