“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Marc Twain 

I DON’T BUY IT

 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”

 grace, detachment and love

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