I too am Dad

I still carry the dogs and brother let me tell you, they still carry me. Ways in which Dickinson ruined me, but also how in and of the ruins, a new order was born. Restaurants scare me, I wonder why.

 

Remember learning how to draw snowmen? You wonder what time of day he was actually crucified. This pain in my skull now, mostly behind the eyes but also in the rear on the left, as if something in the cosmos were trying to enter me, or something within me that the cosmos forgot is trying to leave in order to be remembered.

 

Back to no more coffee, I don’t think so. Spring is space differently, that’s all. Going too fast over the speed bumps, that old problem.

 

Let me now open myself to the deluge, let me forget we ever traveled together. Goldfish dying in Woolworth’s which we nonetheless purchased, only to watch them die days later at home. Something lovely is in me, like my bones are pure amethyst.

 

The darkness coming up from the east. How close to bad men I was growing up, and how even now it affects me, like not knowing will the bottom fall out and is there even a bottom at all. Clearing out the strawberry patch, planting cannabis.

 

Yet I too am Dad. How I cannot sleep anymore, worse than ever, and how it makes me indifferent to dying, as if this body is at last ready to become again the earth, and the earth the cosmos without thinking about it. Heart torn open by shooting stars and never healed, the boy I was, the man I am.

 

Begone? Studying the forsythia I replanted last spring, all three bushes still sprouting, little yellow blossoms, can I get an amen.