9/11/13:years later reminisce

I should have known not to speak

Grandmother asked me how I was doing

I said not well, you say, “Bad day?”

I say, “No, my life is the same, has not changed.”

I think if I claimed to be well, that would indicate how messed up I am

Where I know I am not well with this stage as any healthy person would not be.

Phone rang, she did not hear a word, bothers not to follow up when completed

I misunderstood again, how I am doing, was another ‘what’s up’, not meant for response

Later at the table she starts self-obsessing

Regurgitating a day of this one thinks this, this that, crying at times

At memories of the dead of being strong as if burying someone who loved you back

Is more difficult than loving someone living who abandons you in slander

The difference is lost as listening is not possible

I try to describe the pain is in the day of knowing you are ignorant and bore no witness

To what your daughter did after school, her hopes, fears, and laughter flew into another dad’s ears

You fought and chose breathing over suicide and the words go by

Grandmother is not listening talking about hope, faith and prayer

Throws my mantra and the sky-god in my face: it could always be worse, you are not the only one

(Mandela in the cell, Gandhi hunger strike, Mogadishu I got it long ago without you; 

I just wanted a two minute oasis to be heard; grandiose I digress)

She says, how one day my daughter will see and want different

The level of insult in her words is only muted by our generational differentials

Treating me as if I am five instead of thirty-five; illusions all

Pensions, two deceased husbands, worked ten years out of eighty outside the home

Had to leave high school because girls did not need such education

To be dependent on a man’s earnings who wished to support five kids, three lived, two died

Taking in others like me to share in her husband’s absence as I regroup

In all my dancing-dead drumming beat inside my head 

The crowd of down is thick tonight; I know my daughter loves and misses me

I do not doubt such fundamentals; the insult is that us simply missing each other is insufficient

As if this time is ever recoverable or my hurt and want of a family like my grandmother enjoyed

Can happen at forty in place of twenty; so I am to pray to her god for a time machine?

One that regenerates cellular tissue, deposits in dumpsters and flushes to the commode 

That which was in me capable of being given is a shell scraped

So as this hope and faith are delusions; there are only choices in the empty

Which are tattooed by the unforgettable; that’s what this day is for (never forget?)