Month: February 2019

It might float behind me
a dark cloud, billowing and weightless
but somehow heavy, a storm within
below, above, around me
obscuring bright reality

Or maybe it does have weight
a thick, oozing sludge
swallowing me from toes to throat
consuming me, a dark heavy morass
sticking to every part of me

No wonder I'm exhausted
choked off from the current
of ordinary life, observing
the daily thrum and cadence
of everyone around me
except those others
whose own grief clings
to burdened heels

 
after you were both born
through the front door, this house
settled itself around us, cradled
your childhood in arms of plaster and lathe
came alive with the thrum and pulse
of four hearts beating, a family
a family
a family
a family
each one of us crucial
to the structural integrity
of the whole

but walls can’t keep
the cancer out

after her body was borne
through the front door, this house
groaned beneath the weight
of our collective sorrow

each room shuddered, fibrillating
its wooden bones aching
the memory of us, haunting
the cobweb corners
like a mind tormented