1927

He was thirteen when he died
and his great delight was horses.
He had a slow and steady hand
with a plow at twelve years old.
By the age of nine, he had four sisters.
Slow to read, he learned by seven,
and at four, still sucked his thumb.
His gait was sure at two,
his strong fingers gripping edges.
Their first born, and a son.

1944

He was a soldier now,
his uniform reflected in
a sea of foreign blood,
and his seed spilled inside the legs
of a dark haired girl with eyes
too large and melancholy.
He wretched at the thought of his wife
rocking back and forth with worry.
He strayed from her this night only
the bourbon too weak to cool
the heat of a morning
when death erupted from his hands.

1990

He sat at his great-niece's graduation
shifting on the wooden bench,
squinting at a blur of blue and white students
walking towards uncertain futures.
The youth made him weep
though he could not remember why
as his papery hand spindled over
a last patch of pale hair.

It was written during
the November of my infirmary
a swirl of near death
and morphine laden dreams.

I had traveled down the Mother Road
stumbling on broken cement
and misspent gravel
as weeds grew over the eyes
and out of tthe nostrils
of zombie like doctors
with their mute nurses that
listed down grassy hallways.

My Pakistani lover was recalled
and lost again even as
his curried mouth blazed
and retreated on my
sickly white skin,
and the red barn where we made  love
was burning.

In one poem, I had become
a statue, moss covered,
anchored to a desk as
my body turned to stone and wood.

I mused over the toss and turn
of a friend's body over mine
and the curve of her delicate hips
as they rocked  with abandon.

I know its somewhere in this house
beneath a couch,
in a pile of unopened mail,
in a shelf between a Bible and
a dictionary, or perhaps
sentient with my hallucinations
it has vanished
choosing death over existence
because it hurts too much to live.