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I don’t usually show people “roughs”, but I wanted to share this one. Mom Crossed Over May 1, 2008
I called you and you didn’t answer
I called you and you didn’t answer, as usual,
Then I let myself into your house with my key.
When I saw the back of your head
Tucked into a pillow over the arm of your sofa
It was the same as every other time you had fallen asleep waiting for me.
Seeing the little black curls in your now-thin hair
Your TV was on as always
“Loud enough to wake the dead.”
I called out.
“Morning, Mom!
Did you drop off to sleep again?”
Walked around the end of the sofa
And then….
“Oh, I guess you’re not asleep.”
I touched your throat at the pulse point
Knowing that there was no reason.
Your skin was cold
Hard
Yellowed
Mottled
But you were lying in the same pose as always
One hand tucked over your stomach
Mouth open and eyes closed
Feet tucked up
The other hand on the thigh whose knee pointed away from the rest of you.
How many years had you dozed on the sofa like that?
But this was the last time.
After I made the phone calls with you lying right there
I wandered
I couldn’t leave you
But I couldn’t stay right by you.
I needed to think you were just asleep.
I went into the kitchen
And saw your supper dishes
Rinsed and in the drainer
And your leftovers in the fridge.
The gravy carefully saved from your “treat”,
From your Salisbury steak TV dinner that you loved so much
And a small bite of mashed potatoes.
You had eaten all the carrots.
An ½ slice of cheesecake
In a dessert bowl so that your shaky hands wouldn’t betray it to the floor.
An ½ cup of milky tea,
As always
Saved for a midnight snack
Always eaten at 2am.
An handful of grapes in another bowl,
Rinsed and ready for morning
Set in a soup bowl next to your hard-boiled breakfast egg
And the yogurt cup you had been working on for several days
With a carefully washed and saved lid that must have come from
Store-bought potato salad.
I shut the fridge door and the tears came.
“Mom! Mom!”
I clung to the handle and cried
For all the things that we wouldn’t do.
For all the drives to the grocery necessary no longer,
Where you would sit in the car and, grinning, wave to all and sundry.
For all the trips to watch the ocean and the spouting horns and mountains that we wouldn’t take
For never hearing this spring your cries of “Pinkies!”
As we drove past the blooming wild rhododendrons.
You missed them by only a couple of days, but I guess you couldn’t wait.
“Mom!” I cried out.
I sat at the dining room table.
I talked to you.
Hoping that you could still hear me.
I told you all the things that you didn’t want to hear.
How I loved you even when you drove me crazy because you couldn’t remember.
How you insisted that I buy you a new packet or 6 of sunflower seeds every summer, but you never planted them.
How I loved you even when you were as whiny as a 4-year-old who has missed a nap.
How you were re-reading Harry Potter and the book was on the cluttered coffee table and the rest of the set on the floor on the other side where you couldn’t see them along with everything else that you had shoved off the pile because you couldn’t see it.
How glad I was that you were able to be at home when…
I remembered your pitiful cry when you were in the hospital a year before.
“I don’t want to die here! You promised! You promised!”
And you came home
Puttering with plants that died when you forgot to water them.
Making new starts of your favorite violets in saved containers from grocery salads and sandwich spread.
From your chive cream cheese that you ate on bread since crackers made your gums hurt
And most of those starts died, too.
But some were flourishing in strange places.
On top of the stack of magazines in Dad’s empty chair.
On the bathroom counter behind rinsed bottles and folded up product boxes.
One shut into the cupboard where you kept your box of curlers. Why?
On chairs tucked under the dining room table.
Sitting by the withered unused potatoes in their bin.
In the middle of the shelf where you were saving the throwaway clamshell boxes from croissants and muffins.
How did that stack get that high?
How many times had I tossed those containers only to have you fish them out of the trash and scold me for “wasting them”?
Vase after vase of dried, withered flowers that you didn’t want to throw out,
Pile after pile of catalogues,
Stack after stack after toppled stack of books,
I put those back on the shelves.
I walked around,
picking things up
Weeping when I dragged in a large trash can and started putting all that carefully saved trash into it.
Hoping that you would scold and insist on putting them back where they belonged.
And then I would sit and talk to you and get back up and go back to putting things away and sorting out the junk
Finally they came to take your body away.
I didn’t watch.
I couldn’t,
And then I locked the door behind them,
And went back to my house
Without you.
I just found this in the stash of things I left in Portland, OR, three years ago...:
Dear Brother Arthur,
...disconnected and dismembering the telephone until the typewriter walks in... ...and we have to thank the Subhumans for playing an mpromptu tune out of a second floor window on Stark street a few years ago...and my friend Chris out on the ledge drinking his vacation away, sending out death growls to passersby, and not afraid to invite strange busking gutterpunks up from the street to have a toast...first a Dormouse scuttled into the efficiency and made a nest amid the cat hair balls. Soon there was Art all over the wall - words like "lucubration" - pictures prompting you to have a nice warm cup of shut-the-fuck-up - and stories so aptly told: of plants cared for by the Prabhupada, of siblngs raised with recorders in thier mouths, of platforms and pulleys erected to save the pines, of pugil sticks and tournaments in city parks, and of growing up on the street at thirteen. And then was Bart letting out myriad tongues to make people smile: (throating) eeeaaaaaawwwwwrrrrr, (honking) haw hee h a w hee, (cartooning) shut up beavis...the songs were played into the night. Satan was on the sitar testing out his breath. This was dubbed as a rebellion and it was mentioned that i won't be running. Still Benjaholic tossed the spacebag into the air and all that was heard was a unified cry of "SSSAAAHHH WWWOOOOOOJJJ"...The mad dogs chased us out to sea, and we found ourselves in naked hotsprings, we found ourselves in a witch's hobbit hole speaking elvish to the smell of moldy pizza forgotten under the couch, we found ourselves boarded on a summit with broken backs and twisted ankles because we neglected to give silence when passing by the lumberjacks' rock, we found ourselves in a cave full of strippers with the filth of junk piled high in thier eyes the pets food piled high in the litterbox, and we found ourselves in a church denominated to death metal and free pancakes and mudwrestling and absynthe, and we found oursleves in a temple in the woods filled with pillows squeezing a plastic water bottle that turned us into easter bunnies, and we found ourselves as american gods snapping the strings of ukelele while mauling jewish girls with shopping carts, and we found ourselves on stage in a subliminally sickened system with a pad of chaos banging the drumsof war while the saints came marching in, and most fondly to the corners of my mouth, we found ourselves bombing zoos with flashlights and bicycles in the dark and coasting down to common ground with only a breeze and a scream in our heart...You moved in once and shared our food, but then paulo died while the cops were after you because your dad was in prison after you went to the rainbow gathering in australia. But the broken closet doorturned out to be a dinner table after all and thanksgiving was born away home. My "wife" became an "if we" and you moved in once again. One night you basked in a half-drunken glow and told me your story about how wonderful it is to orgasm while playing for the receiving team. Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line you helped to save my life too. I can only hope that i helped you with yours simply by listening and remembering your tale. I always admired your charm in being able to put a smile on just about any girl that happened to walk by you on the street. I always hoped f or y ou that you would one day find that special companion - male or female - that would stop and hear your song and never walk away - ever since you told me that it was your dream to one day have a family of your own. I will keep the prayer vigil for you and every other solitary sould that i meet, but i realize for some it is not their f ate to mix footprints. So even if "emily" turns into "my lie" you can surely res t on the lawn that "benjaholic" will never turn into the "ole chn jab". Yet as the story goes, the wind continues to blow. It blew you past the stark street stalkers numbers one through ten while bussing tabls in a room full of sweaty men. It blew meinto a basement with the ghosts of Sodom and Gomorrah who buried me with my broken heart. It blew you under the welder's torch to find that you'd exchanged sleeping on other peoples' couches for a couchless apartment of your very own. It blew me behind wheelchairs to find that i had exchange my only taste of bachelorhood for a room of my very own in my parents' house. It blew you your own personal slave. It blew me back my wife. It blew me back to sleep on your floor for once and to give you my wedding dishes f or your slave to wash. It blew me back to the first house of my own. it blew you the longest girlfriend of your adult life. then one day, in fact today, you p honed me at six am while i was on te can and i got your address to mail this tomorrow.
i love you..........................brotherbenjaholic
-SchweißerMann, the HyPerverted
