The  Unsaid Words and the Bitter Taste Still
 
To scrawl bits and pieces upon arising this morning:
caffeine and sinking agony familiar friends upon rising;
thoughts of you, thoughts of the future, thoughts arranging
themselves as before the executioner of The Routine
unforgiving dry air; the hum of the fan to stave it off
I scrawled all of this down, hoping for some resolution
some character, some part of what's inside
to rear, to buck to make an ugly head transform,
to heal this malformed perception
this meta-distortion
this mixed message mélange
born way before the first hit, toke
drink, blast or
girl.
 
I never see the boxer that lives across the street, save for his big fancy
cars
and the harried unsmiling women that drive them
with their packages and children
the sunflowers have long since died; weeds now obscure the lone camellia
that once struck me with your aura,
you saved me from the abyss of myself and my family,
the storm from whence I came:
My mother called me this morning telling me my father was no good
that he might have judgments against him, that legal haranguing is in the
near future
all of it is beyond me, the kitchen sink, inheritance drama,
communion, intimacy
mopping the floor, introspection
and finding words to catch elite eyes
for the next unwritten poem.
 
They're all the same process, more or less
you die either way, the legacy is either impressive or embarrassing.
You leave mountains of debt or blood money
for someone else to obsess on
You die alone with your progeny crawling out from underneath you
with a fistful of resentments and unsaid words, the lost memories and bitter
taste still lingering a generation of unloved, beaten clones later. You
spend inheritance money
on sex or food or crack or Jim Beam
                   --on therapy.
 
Or you spend inheritance money on therapy: you sit in the chair, on the
couch,
you wax introspective, you feel whole and alone, strong as some vast wind,
voluminous as some unborn star you are the empty spaces so many want to fill
but stay empty, spiritual cul de sacs, emotional vacuums. You become
transparent
you sip coffee, you murder and create and fantasize in the theater of
synapses
sleep comes with petulant pretense, only after the prayers have been
muttered
and the dreams rehearsed.
 
This all came out this morning, I wish I had no control over it.
but the symphony has ended, unlike so many bottles that drank from me
the electric hum isn't a fan, but relentless monotony,
as the robotic mothers push their babies up and down my wise hill
the garage sales continue and the merciless drum of humanity
won't stop its tattoo across my breast.
 
After giving all of it up there's still so much
there's still the lingering question and the tortured thoughts of what would
have happened what could have been what might still appear
out of the fog and terror of so many mornings unlike this one,
so many evenings mired in the shame of vacuous fantasy\
 
Your memory sustains me,
you don't even know this yet,
you don't know any of this yet
and often, I think
neither
do
I.