a poetry blog

it’s been almost three months since your passing. how many more months had passed since we last spoke on the phone? i can’t quite recall. and if i remember correctly, the last time i ever saw you in person was christmas of 2015. early morning, you left vancouver on a greyhound, after an uncomfortable and generally unenjoyable visit for the holidays. we could have seen each other in 2019 but you decided not to come to my college graduation. i was disappointed but not surprised. maybe relieved, too. your only other visit to maine was incredibly stressful for me - you don’t have a cell phone because they “cause cancer” so we couldn’t find you at the bus stop. we stopped by every shitty motel on pleasant street before we saw you and picked you up. eight years. i can’t believe that more than eight years have passed since i last saw you in person. i have grown into a whole person you did not and could not know. i earned two degrees. i started then changed careers. i got married. i became an adult. i kept putting off visiting you in california because it is, or was, frankly hard to be around you. i keep writing in the present tense which says a lot. it’s like schrodinger’s cat, you are in two states at once, both alive and dead. because your passing did not change the day-to-day of my life, so it’s hard to feel the weight of it all. but it’s final, and i won’t ever see you again. you could have been a different man and had a better life. but your mental illness shrouded a path forward. that’s schizophrenia for you. your reality was different than mine, but it was your reality nevertheless. and i can only imagine how the voices and delusions and the loneliness were all too real. and i’m sorry things weren’t different. i don’t know why you developed schizophrenia, if there was any contributing factors. i have a story in my head about me being present at the doctor’s office when they diagnosed you, but i don’t know if that is real or not. i don’t think it is. i worry for myself, that i will turn out like you. i’ve memorized the statistic by heart. how you are 10% more likely to develop schizophrenia if a first-degree relative like a parent has it. you’ve already contributed to my depression, my anxiety, my deep rooted distrust of men. it would be just my luck, my draw of the genetic lottery. will malignant growths on my reproductive organs kill me by age 43 or will i spend my later years on a different planet than everyone else? dad, i don’t even feel like i fit in during my grief support group. i am there for you, for my loss of you, but i don’t know what to share. the people in my group loved the people they lost. i loved you too but i don’t have many positive memories of you. the facilitator asked if there are traits i hold that would allow others to see a little part of you within me. and i don’t know, because i never got to know who you were. i wish i knew more about who you were before you got sick. i do have little shards of your selfhood to grasp onto, to attribute some greater meaning. your love of music: bob marley, woody guthrie. maybe the artists we listened to on all of our car rides is what made me a little anti-establishment. you loved swimming and biking and found serenity when you moved your body, until you were too sick to do that anymore. you collected national geographic magazines, you liked to write me letters. you considered yourself a pacifist, someone who didn’t want to harm others. i don’t know what else to say. you have caused me so much pain. but despite it all, i don’t hold much anger in my heart for you. i pity you. i resent you. but i can’t boil it down to a simple anger. all that is left to say is i love you, and i hope you are at peace.

who but a narc pseudo-savior wants to punch a broken kid? she spent the better part of twenty years distant like the morning moon eyes closed and shadow boxing the likeness that she made of me an effigy to burn, to spurn, to turn away

the heat is so heavy, it feels like a fever tent by the water, i think that we'll sleep here tonight i’m in a camp chair, stoned by the fire, speaking in circles, senseless and tired and to no one in particular i say today would have been your birthday 58, what an age, so great to think you'd have made it but i cant imagine a world with you still here, like being a kid who couldn't see how i could live without you but yet, i was forced to i see your ghost in the bay, in the roads in the river’s rolling stones it is god’s atonement to me, mystic apology for making me be a living memorial service, a tragedy with no closing curtain depressive & anxious, fate uncertain carrying an eternal hurt and i cant imagine a world with you still here, like being a kid who couldn't see how i could live without you but yet, i was forced to but yet, i was forced to i see your ghost on the street i feel you in every new person i meet in places that you've never seen angel in a foreign land by a new sea, in my lonely dreams, hang from a necklace i’ll wear til it breaks off of me the heat is so heavy, it feels like a fever once made a skeptic and turned a believer spirits in the rearview tremor and shimmer the sky turns pink and the sun grows dimmer 444 in script on the window, gives me protection from all of the world’s throes wherever you are, there you go, wherever you are, there you go wherever you are, there you go i see your ghost, where you are, there you go, i see your ghost, where you are, there you go, i see your ghost, where you are, and i see, you live on in me for better or worse, my body’s a graveyard haunted by your soul, i love it though i need it more than you could ever know

The world is moving ahead. The weight lies on my chest for an eternity. I write my truth into existence, quietly, concealed in metaphor, infinitely strange to myself. 

the land is on fire and i just want to be kissed. i want you to speak in tongues into the shallows  of my sour heart. when i am alone i am a thin veil of a being, a dissolving wafer, a gossamer girl masquerading in skin. i feel like i cannot get the love i need from this world. where would i even begin?

it is reunion in the sense that we are now separated by distance and continent and desires and also in the sense that the word “reunion” signifies a prior ending because we will never be together in the way that we once were joyful and stupid and drunk  off of warm vodka and skunked beer without anywhere or anyone to be never thinking beyond the night until its close but this is beautiful too, i think wiser and walking on the sidewalks of a new city, falling into old roles, giddy with familiarity, speaking of remember whens and whos  and new dreams and fears unsure if we are good enough to be who we planned on being by now sure that we are something worth being

watch the raindrops race  across the windowpane i feel like a kid again always in space there was a city here  before the fog hid it away forgive me for longing for every rainy day every forgotten night i want it with you

in another life, maybe i was an apothecary drawn to the power of all living things weaving solutions for others out of earth’s herb and flower: chamomile, echinacea, foxglove, ginseng. a home and pharmacy filled, not with idle belongings, but with jars and drums of verdant faith.  maybe the tinctures and pastes never really worked (maybe it was only feverish beautiful false magic, much like anything else) but everyone wanted something to believe in, then and now.  their promise was enough.