Mother

Sometimes I just sit with you,
Or read you some lines from that novel
I’ve been working on recently.
Your eyes wander
To the shapeless, foreign bag.
That pale, silvery liquid like a thread
That you’re stubbornly clinging onto.

We don’t do much in those dawn hours
Or the twilight.
If I feel kind enough I might just
Scatter a few crumbs about the ghosts
In our lives that have come and gone.
Dad, Henry, the guy at the
Drugstore who called me pretty.
Your hands always twitch
When the words ooze out of me.
Like sticky saliva, pooling near the stiff
Hospital chair,
Gluing me here to you.

Most days,
I go to you for answers,
Or rather to unburden myself.
My thoughts heavy like stones,
And you a pond.
You’re a dead man, you can’t talk,
But I know you’re listening,
From the pale blue waves on the monitor
That I ride.
Sometimes I can even hear you reprimanding me
Through the silence, by far
Your only weapon now.

I read my manuscripts to you.
I ask for suggestions, knowing all too well
That you can’t and won’t answer.
Does it kill you to see how I’ve turned out?
I could leave right now.
Your shell, so frail and shriveled,
Almost kind,
In that stiff bed swallowing you like a rose.
Or the mouth of a dark, inviting cave.
Do you ever regret how you’ve
Been to me?

Sometimes when you’re really peaceful,
I hold my breath just to hear
The sound of you struggling.

No one knows I pushed you
Down the flight of stairs that one time
That burst the tumor in your brain.
Sometimes when I’m wasted enough,
I think that I shouldn’t have.
We could go on, Mother,
Just the two of us.
Let me pluck your crown to pieces.

Instead, I come to you:
A bundle of flowers in one hand,
A web of stories in the other.