***In Memory of my Father***Heaven Added an Angel

[SoldOut4Christ]

I find myself unable to comprehend strained relationships between fathers and their children, as for 13 years of my life, a real-life angel walked amongst us and committed himself to his family, until the silent, yet unrelenting hand of cancer took him away.  Today, December 18th, 2008, I remember one of the greatest men that ever lived.  Dad, this poem is for you and for all others who are yet in mourning and/or experiencing death in some shape, form, or fashion..

Cause & Effect

A Zuihitsu for those who die daily:

I once knew a man of silent stares.  He was called father to five sons and two daughters.  A widowed wife wearing the mask of a thousand deaths has married again, cried again.  She is remembering their wedding day, sitting alone wearing an expressionless emotion--bare and distant.  Somewhere, he takes snapshots of the aftereffect of his going. He recalls the muddled memories of their existence together.  His children have grown into his space.

Somewhere a family mourns a father's passing.

We have sold ourselves to pimps...promiscuous...faceless in the shadows of unfamiliar bedrooms.  We hobble about the floors searching out undergarments and souls.  We have lost ourselves to the shedding of skin, our morals buckling within our knees.  We, later, become figures dodging strangers in the brink of night.

We have all experienced dying.

If a man says he loves you, but refuses to marry you, does that mean he really doesn't love you or is it that he really loves you but doesn't want to get married because he loves you so much he can't bare to risk change?  The answer to this question will be revealed in next year's issue of Woes in Love.

At the funeral parlor, a girl cries into her father's casket.  His embalmed body is wet with tears.  His make-up runs down the sides of the coffin onto the girl's white dress.  At home, she will run her fingers across the brown smudge of foundation and remember this is not how her father once was.  Someone will agree while discussing his appearance later that day over dinner.

Everywhere he went he was praised.  It was the dominance of strong male figure, family man; I don't play that stuff, arousing their fancy.  He drove a big, blue Cadillac with white-wall tires.  "Pull up your pants son before you lose your manhood."  Sons of the same qualities will follow in his footsteps.

Somewhere a family mourns a father's passing.

I was aware of my lowest point, when I consumed too many pills and men and drinks made with men in mind.  I wanted to turn in my resignation as head pharmacy technician and human being, strip off my clothes and run through the streets of Chicago shouting "I am alone and wanting to not be alone in this alone type of world."

Mourning isn't a biased subject.

I am annoyed by men who hock and spit and scratch and nibble at their unclean nails.  It is this annoyance causing me to write about such a thing, a thing such as this.  I pray to God to send me a man or men who do not do things such as this.  Relieve a girl like me of all the hocking and spitting and scratching and nibbling on unclean nails.

At the wake of a deceased loved one, many people cried and planted flowers next to the two-day-old corpse...faded into the brush just beneath the burial site.  Hands full of mud, decided they would resurrect the deceased, resurrect themselves, or what they once were before today.  It is the impermanence of life in our today, purchasing our caskets for tomorrow.

Somewhere a family mourns a father's passing.

There is a girl somewhere trapped within the body of a woman.  She is tearing away old flesh, painted and probed.  The heat of this unwanted body stifles her innocence.  She never wanted to grow old...to grow.  It is the passing away of self within a shattered reflection bringing her to this.

And death becomes her.

I was once praised for speaking a certain way.  Phone sex voice they called it.  You should write books, they told me, while gawking at the explicit material which danced on the pages of my erotica chapters.  They came in numbers, as I watched them spill onto the pages, body juices marinating with the text.

Mutliple orgasms are another language, though we sometimes can't speak.

She spoke of her marriage as if cursed.  She was unhappy on the third day, or maybe the first.  I watched her face lose its tint on the way down the aisle.  She was supposed to be happy, supposed to be.  He wore a too tight tux and shoes as he shimmied towards her...towards this.

Where have all the happy couples gone?

Loose garments trail her like an ocean of tears, like a week-old stench, and she is dead.  She has died within her lover's gaze.  Crumbling beneath a tight fist, he finds her broken within his palm.  And we will mourn her death...dress up in black, while weeping over her coffin and calling out to her, though we know she won't return.

Somewhere a family mourns.

SUDDEN:  See Death

Mourning:  See Me

Father:  See Restvale Cemetary, Row B56

Somewhere a family mourns a father's passing.

 

ã Demetria M. Keys 2008

 

 

[divinity80921]

Dec. 18, 2008 at 6:28 PM

Wow. I am awed, D.

[Pinky830]

Dec. 19, 2008 at 10:11 AM

Oh my sista this was very deep. You know of my struggles with dealing with the untimely death of my father and this struggle I fight with everyday. I will keep you in my prayers as you have kept me in yours.

[LDYVIRTUE]

Dec. 20, 2008 at 11:32 AM

This is a beautiful poem D.  I do not have a relationship with my father and I believe that God does everything for a reason, he protects his own. We don't always understand what God does or even why sometimes but I trust him. I mourn with all that have lost their father and will be praying for your strength. Be blessed!