deathanddying

Watching him slowly die, The feelings inside me are so erratic, I have moments of sadness seeing a human life suffer accompanied by instant flashes of years of ptorment I endured at the hands of this person. I used to believe that I hated him, but that’s not accurate. It’s much more complicated than that. I hate what he did to me, I hate remembering all the abuse, he’s not someone that I particularly like but being that he’s my father I’ve never been able to fully descend into hatred, my true feelings lie somewhere between ambivalence and dissociative empathy. Growing up I planned abd plotted his death a million times in my mind with me being happier and relieved that he’s gone, given those vivid rémunérations I should be elated that cancer is ravishing him slowly but surely and that on his way to death he gets to suffer like I suffered but I don’t feel elated watching the slow death of even a tormentor doesn’t come with elation it fills me with sorrow not the intense weeping kind the more empathetic witness kind. It’s conflicting abd feels like a betrayal to the little boy who wants and needs revenge, who still needs there to be some atonement for all he had to endure. The other day my sister informed me that they found maggots in an infection that he hadn’t noticed, hearing that I was horrified and repulsed. Y the mère though of maggots crawling through human flesh, I wanted to vomit and my heart sank but I didn’t cry! Isn’t this what I wanted isn’t this se karmic retribution? Why am I filled with regret and anxiety. For someone that was incapable of feeling that for me why do I even care? There are many questions but no answers. Someone told me long time ago to never seek revenge, because the universe will always right itself you don’t have to carry it just give it over. I’ve trusted that bit of wisdom ever since, and remarkably I think it’s correct. I guess in releasing from carrying revenge I’m left with just sorrow in watching someone slowly die. I feel what I feel but I have no hatred I seek no revenge and after all this time I’m healing from the abuse by giving it over to the universe!

#MightyPoets
#Cancer here’s a poem I wrote thinking about my body after I die from #MetastaticBreastCancer
On Fire
Bury me amongst the trees
Where redwoods overlook the sea
From atop a crossed mountain
Where my body will quicken
From flesh into sand.
Beneath the needle-bed’s
Blanket, the fibers of my hair weave
A way through the wind-filled leaves.
Heat my voice with borrowed sun
What once kissed my cheeks
Where my freckles reached to meet.
You now hear my broken chords
Faintly in the the distance unmoored
Lapping at the salted shore.
Safely clean I lay down on a million fine grains of sand
Never feeling myself again I repeat
To anyone: I am an empty vessel.
I’ll still wake every morning,
Habitually my hands still asleep
Parting the fitted sheets aways,
Long gone I still reach after you.
I am the water, then the dew
Maturing into a pinguid mist.
The palms clap and sway to
Conduct the band at noon
To play a song of our bequest.
The hour’s imminent.
Time to ride a wicked dream on
A silk weaved carpet twisted
With last night’s ghostly breath.
Come take inventory of my remains
Should the tree mark me no more.

The lumber that’s become of me
Taken over by the shore. I am a house
Now - a shelter for a family to whom you
Lost me once again. My soul holds up
The walls now, my legs hammered
Into floorboards, arms encircle
Every bedroom where the dormers rest.
My fingers lace together to build
A painted white front porch,
That’s my hips now a swing
I hang there, under the eaves.
Look up to see my head holds high
A roof; my back’s now the front door
My eyes frame the windows, my heart beats
From the kitchen.

My birds left the
Forest knowing where my mouth now sings
And the woodpecker that lived inside my trunk
Hollowed out my attic in the spring.
Let me stand strong and steady
For at least a hundred years.
By then, long gone, you built your own.
And our lives live on, unworldly yet eternally.

Looking down at the rubble of what’s
Left of my body in the demolition heap.
What at all might grow from me who once
You buried underneath a tree?
Let me now burn someone’s hands
A lit fire from my plight.
It’s cold outside where I once stood
In the trees and dark of night
Where I’ll burn vast and luminous
My spirit gives newborn light.