The oil at the surface
The merely adequate raft I am sailing on
Through life’s monsoons
Is but a random cork and wick on a grave’s votive candle
Its feeble light keeping company to the departed
Along with the survivors’ remembrance
As simple a fate gifted me a gliding ease to endure
This journey
Me, the anointed one, spared from drowning in the waters beneath
My oil rising to the top
I Painted Myself Into A Corner
A chokehold is now the winnowing of escape routes
Anxiety is even running out of breath
No matching suggestions for relief offered
To the inevitable fruitless of pursuit’s attainment
Old age is not for ninnies
And dying is not painlessly obtained
“Some day soon, you will meet me
As you arrive at this crossroads” she said with sorrowful resign
Pandora’s box inheritance for future
A gift I did not expect, none other but
The effort and the desired end
A mere random match
Mon petit bonheur
Survive the grey
Force them flowering quince sticks to bloom
Light all the frankincense candles
The public house of worship is now
Your Ms Tittlemouse abode cut-out
Winter’s reckoning is counting
Your days remaining, as much as the joy of rebirth
Bookmarking your emotions with all the stuffing of a life
Well lived
Longevity
My mother cannot move
Her joints flexed are rotted corns
Hardened with stubbornness and crystallized pain
She is a mighty oak
Every branch exchanged sway with immobility
Each embrace skeletonized love to closet ghosts
The price of living past her prime
Is shattering wind, erasing green hope
Her fatalism resembles gravity
Time fulness is her elongated death, a promise to me
“You will remember me when you too are here”
RENDERING
Fat stores poisons
Like stashed dowries
The doctor says
Like wedding sheets
Frayed from bodies
Thrashing for decades
Of marital bliss or distress - either way
The rendering tears evaporate its moisture
Making the blubber safe to keep
Along dispersing the toxin like
Wrung white-out anger blizzards
The rivulets of hot oil
Tattoo your heart
With genealogy’s traumas
Oh so permanent and cannibal feast of attachment
A bad eye afternoon
Mother, your
Slicing words, a disco-dizzy
Of meanness danced this afternoon
And four decades of sour starter
Masterfully baked
An ill-will bread
Memories are ash-grey and
Green, both envy
And riches hues
But the cursing eye is steely blue
Much like the blue bird of happiness
Fleeting from tree to tree
