By not a romatic love, a family love
Date: 10 June 2000
Lifesupport
When I was nine I thought everyone must hate me.
Maybe everyone in the entire world.
I watched you slither back into your skin.
Watched your wife’s hand slip, then slide off the lifesupport.
She said you’d have wanted it this way.
When I was nine I crept downstairs in my sleep in search of my doll with the big plastic
head.
Your wife, she said you’d kept her all locked up in that big house, big steps with prints of
the Mona Lisa, the Empire states building hanging from each shadowy wall.
She said you had kept her voice muffled in the pillow.
She said, the day you died she walked home in her flowered pantsuit and took her first
breathe of air since you fell ill four years ago.
She said it felt good to breathe again and she cried
because your death was a relief
from the bills
and watching your body swell in all the wrong places.
Grow thin in all the wrong places.
Your wife, she said it was fucking hell.
When I was nine I put on my magic decoder ring from the cereal box.
I held your picture, the stuffed lamb you gave me a year before and I sat
under the plastic table in the rain.
You’d said you loved me and that I was your favorite girl.
The day you died when buried you
I wondered if
i’d fall face first with you underground.
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