Yesterday at 3:31 PM

Yesterday at 3:31 PM, I lost my Gradddad. It was expected, but not in the usual way. He was sick. He was old. He wanted to die. His wife was waiting for him. But all of that does not remove the fact that he is gone now. I will not talk with again. I will not laugh with him again. I will not wonder at him again. I now have to live with the fact that I only have one real grandparent left. My mom now is an orphan. She is alone and has never had to deal with that, but as of yesterday, she let go of a hand that has been hers to hold for the last 58 years, but now that hand is cold and no longer grips back at hers. She dropped it and fled to the only safety she knows. All of it makes me very sad and I'm completely unsure of how to feel about any of it. But as of today, I only have one grandparent left and he seems so very far away. The older I get, the more the first line of Charles Frazier's second book means to me: There is no scathless journey. We are moving as quickly as we can and time is not stopping. Only moving ahead at an alarming rate and we are all losing so much that we cannot ever seem to gather our losses so we can see what we have left. I will miss him a lot and am so sad that I avoided him. I can never see him again and that is something I will regret.

Gentle Twilight Spreads-A Poem

Gentle twilight spreads and lifts,
Tender-aged mockingbirds flit and play,
Speaking with other's voices repartee,
Distant summer'd noises heave and sigh,
Lifting the moon to its celestial threshold,
All know the humidity and wish to say,
The unwanted phrase and watch it soar,
Taking summer and caprice superfluous,
And leaving only what's relevant,
To everyone's great and terrible dismay.

(2007-Dothan, Al)

The Last Day of the Year-A Poem

The last day of the year,
one of three hundred and sixty-five,
three hundred and sixty-fifth of three hundred and sixty five,
the last of of them,
the end to a long line of moments,
an end of a movement towards,
the beginning of the end,
an end to a beginning,
spinning rapidly in splitting seconds,
passing,
leaving a whole year behind,
remembering,
everything of three hundred and sixty four days,
moments,
pleasures,
pains,
excitements,
trials,
laughs,
tears,
moving and flowing,
out with the old,
in with the new,
the same,
TIME.

Fall Rain-A Poem

Light rain falls,
Like dust,
Early morning liquid residue,
Turning dry earth into,
Primeval particles bubble and ooze,
Reliving constant transfer,
Endothermic atoms rotate to spin,
All unnoticed,
All invisible,
All outside my window free.

A Beloved Country-A Vignette-Part 2

She could see the words behind his eyes and watched them bubble and girgle to the top and prematurely explode with steam as they spewed from his mouth; she did not listen to the words as they came, but followed them as motions and sounds that crawled and flowed over and into her ears and soothed her. They became incessant lullibies.
He tried to stop them, but still they came; a never ending deluge of all his errors exposed. Emotional lacerations in spoken form; cutting him each time anew. He hated the sounds of his voice and it made his own skin stretch, coil, tighten, and reconstrict; each time a little more quickly and strained, attempting with each movement to try and hide again only to realize refuge was always far away and he was alone again. All eyes were on him and they were bored. He didn't know why she stayed with him; if it were the other way around, he would have never showed up to begin with. He repulsed even himself; even his nightmares seemed to let him down. He felt he was swimming and all his words were swirling around him and he kept trying to paddle against them, but they wouldn't let him move at all, but they also wouldn't let him drown. He had long ago quick trying to fight against them, but was increasingly angry at his own apathy, but there was never a solution. All there was were the words and so they came; rushing and spilling all through the rooms and time and he was alone and he each syllable would look at him in his nervous, brown eyes and mock him with mounting repitition.....