"Disclaimer"

Threads twisted on a late night conversation.
Wrecked resemblance.
Fiction.
Past real.
Sipping on this bold, beautiful version.

You'll be whispering I love you.

A mile long coverlet of verbatim, of merely coincidental,
of unending blue veins that say sorry.

You'll invent a golden dialogue used up years ago.
Held up on you're gears under the blades of fluorescent midnights.

A long shallow backdrop of overstuffed secrets,
that bring a blizzard of text book good-byes.

Obiter... In Passing

I was afraid to watch you die. I didn't know how to face you, realizing the person I had known all my life was fading away. I could no longer recognize you, just as you could no longer recognize me. I couldn't face the fact that soon your frail figure would be just an empty reminder of you. Everyone kept saying it was time to say goodbye, but I couldn't. I kept thinking there has to be more to it then this. This can't be it, this can't be how it ends, without any dignity, time robbing us of ourselves. And so I didn't.... I never went to say goodbye, and death would not wait. You went in the night. It was dark and cold and the world celebrated a new year as you left it. In the morning when I knew you were gone I lay in my bed, wrapped in your blanket and wept until I felt emptied.

After you were gone I dreamed of you. Dreamed you had found your way home and found all the rooms empty, stripped already of the life you had built. The floors and walls had already begun to decompose, and it wouldn't be long until they were completely gone, as though this house had never been, as though you had never been. They would deteriorate into the earth just as you are now. I followed you as you walked through the empty rooms, eyes wide with fear and confusion, and I couldn't help thinking you had just realized you were dead and everyone you loved had already let go of you. I watched, as a slow animalistic cry of anguish vibrated up and out of you in waves of pain. You curled up on the soiled floors of your kitchen and wept. They were all so quick to forget, so quick to gut this place. We live forever in memories and they had already begun to sweep them away. It would only be a matter of time until all memory of you would be gone. When children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren would know nothing of you. Just a name, a photograph of a person they didn't know, didn't understand, didn't whisper secrets to. I stood and wept over you, angry. Angry that time would take everything away that had once been you. This house, the life you built, the rose bushes you planted in the garden.... Until I would grow old, until time would begin to rob me of my memory of you, just as time had robbed me of you.

Sometimes I sit, my hands placed palm down on the table where we used to eat together. I rest my face against the smooth wood and think of you, of secret conversations, of hot summers and the smell of the dirt on my hands and knees in your rose gardens and I can still smell you.

-excerpt from Obiter.... In Passing, a unique artist book