9.14.17

The child did not have the word

for sick, but she reached up and touched

her mother’s face

from time to time

and felt along the jawline

and the craters in her cheeks,

felt where emptiness now was,

and thought, in the way only children can,

that something is different.

Not bad, not fantastic–

different.

 

 

Creatures of habit:

Deviation = Catastrophe

 

 

No part of us should be allowed to leave.

It feels right when we add to ourselves,

but when we subtract?

 

 

Have you noticed when the overweight

shed pounds we tell them to their face

they look spectacular, and behind their backs

we ponder their illnesses. Autoimmune? Cancer? 

His father was a schizophrenic. 

 

 

After the divorce I anticipated happily

the new life I’d lead sp

lit between

two households.

But that reality collapsed.

My parents still take vacations together

and massage each other’s hands with lotion,

and I fear they are closer now in hate

than they ever were in love.

 

 

Change, though. That is what I wanted,

what I was denied.

Everything is everything,

and I wish that for the sake of sanity

something, anything

would happen.

 

 

I think of that child now,

the one who felt her mother’s

hollow face. She will one day

be an adult, waiting someplace

in one of the world’s infinite

silences, thinking:

What is wrong with me?

It is precisely what she

does not

cannot

will not

ever learn, because nothing

is a concept unbearable;

 

 

you cannot teach

emptiness; but you can

feel it to the bone.

 

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Written at 10:35 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA.