Bones

It’s 6. I’m sitting in the van after work. The alarm for my meds goes off. Mechanical. Methodical. That is how my days have become.

I wash the pill down with 2-day-old coffee sitting in the cup holder.

My eyes are sore and dry from always being so wet.

Acquaintances and friends come. They hold me throughout the day.

They say they are so sorry.

I say I am too.

I hold it all surface level. Like a glass full of water about to spill over. Surface tension.

Until I get safely to the van where I can cry loud and ugly and no one can hear it.

This grief is a voracious, rabid animal ripping you from my flesh.

Bone exposed.

I am a rack of bones moving through the world. 

I am teeth in a skull in the desert. An eternal grimace in the sand. 

Which is still more than you are now...black ash, wet with rain.

Stardust

We had a little secret, you and I, when you were tiny. 

When your father worked nights and the apartment was quiet and dark, I would put on my favorite Willie Nelson Album and slow dance with you, and sing softly in your ear.

Your tiny wisps of breath on my neck as you slept.

You were all mine. My first true love. The first real love of my life. I had no idea that my teenaged heart could hold so much.

I sang you to sleep.

And now you sleep forever.

I see you in my dreams, in some other place. Sometimes smiling at me, taking over the horizon with your light.

There is not a single second that isn’t consumed with the longing for you now.

For this all to be a dream.

For all the singing into your voicemail not to all be for naught...the letters begging you to please return to me somewhere in a landfill.

All day I put on a face to meet faces and after work I crash into you.

I scream your name into the wind as I drive home in the evening; relentless tears streaming down my face.

My stardust baby, it cannot be. Where have you gone?

.......sometimes I wonder why I spend, the lonely nights dreaming of a song;

The melody haunts my reverie ,and I am once again with you.....

https://youtu.be/Hf5UvKjCDUU

Ancient Oaks

My grief is a bottomless chasm.

A deep and dark unfillable hole.

Even the ancient oaks here weep for you with their reverently bowed branches and Spanish moss raiments trailing in the evening breezes.

The moon is bright and full and the air thick with tears that mingle with sounds of the southern evening.

The crickets sing low with longing.

I close my eyes.

I hear your voice.

Mom, please don’t cry anymore.

The Gulf Shore

You are the shadows of shore birds over the water. 

You are here, but you are not.

You are the puffs and billows of clouds in the bright dome of the sky. Transient and beautiful.

You are here, but

you are not.

Bowling Green

We have made it to Bowling Green. 

Every mile I drive, I move toward the finality. 

The moon 3/4 full in an empty sky except for a single star. A single pinhole in a black canvas. 

Son, is there really more?

Are you somewhere out there beyond the stars?

Are you with God?

Were you welcomed by familiars?

Are you without or within, or both?

I repeat your voice; your laughter, inside my head over and over. I am terrified I’ll forget how you sound.

I call your voicemail several times a day just to hear the greeting.

When all is still and dark the tears come. I allow them to fall and run over my cheeks to fill the tiny cups in my ears.

My chest is so heavy with the regret and the questions and the weight of the unfinished.

Lazarus

You saturate every waking moment, even my dreams, with your absence. Such deep grief. Empty spaces. Lost hopes.

Your sister here after a date night, so beautiful, so radiant. Little Vinnie and his pretend world, the sincerity and sweetness and silliness of your youngest brother Jeremy...you will never know these things. 

I go to bed. Saturating the pillow with tears.

Sleep never comes and I lay awake and stare into the darkness. 

What could I have done....what could I have done...what could I have done to change it....

I would trade my own life to make you whole again. To roll the stone away.

3:38 a.m.

The moon is just a sliver. It’s 3:37 a.m.

Everything I experience is tainted with grief.

Everything is stained with it.