Towards the end,
We embraced your every breath,
Holding on for dear life,
But like fragile pottery,
You began to crack in our arms,
Wilting,
Fading,
Now resting,
We’ll be curators of your name,
We no longer have the full article,
But in our tearstrewn hands,
We still hold the shards of your memory,
Ever and always.
You gave us life,
Between the both of you,
Now a troika you are,
Mother Father and Stepfather,
Your love has always been capital,
Shoulders always ready for tears,
A beginning of blood and pain,
And then decades,
Bearing us through barbs and salt,
Holding us,
Feeding us,
Supporting our hobbies,
I could not list your accolades,
There are not enough hours,
But on this day of family,
Please allow me to state,
Thank you to my parents,
For all you do.
Within a family unit,
There is often a black sheep,
A knife that doesn’t fit in the drawer,
Making incisions in its own style,
Shunned by the whole kitchen,
Reduced to a sad anecdote,
At times that individual is at fault,
A blade used for untoward purpose,
And rightly discarded,
Other times it is the family that’s wrong,
Perhaps through hate or bigotry,
Slicing haphazardly like a machete,
In that event,
Don’t succumb to the same nasty rust,
Be the blade that severs generational evil,
Don’t inflict a cutting legacy on your children,
Be better,
Cut the ties.
Mother,
Mummy,
This scrawl is all for you,
You’re my biggest fan,
My support network,
My inspiration,
My maternal cheerleader,
Solace is wherever you are,
Every trial I face,
Each scratch and broken bone,
Or tumbling down the foulest fissure,
I stand stalwart,
Because you’re there,
I may be a mummy’s boy,
But there’s no shame,
Quite the contrary,
I’m proud to be your son,
I love you mum.
This table holds years,
Connections soaked into its timber,
As well as generations under its side,
Saturnalia has brought us all here,
Grandparents to parents to siblings,
Matriarch at the head as is expected,
She feeds us like she holds us together,
Roasties and more variety than a butcher,
We’re all together,
As one,
As a family,
Around this table.
This nursery is held often out of sight,
Behind church walls and ragged hedge lines,
Out of mind,
At least that’s the hope,
This garden of corpses,
Decorated by obelisks and headstones,
It’s home to crops like you and I,
Planted here by fate and chance,
The rows are a series of stories carved into granite,
This old soil holds more than morbid botany,
There are memories planted here,
From babes cooing to final embraces,
Joy and rancor and fear preserved,
Every romance and broken heart under the sun,
All eventually find themselves interred here,
Along with worms and flies,
Awaiting a harvest that will never come.
All is quiet and pure under the christmas lights,
Families finally resting their heads,
With the younglings awaiting he in the red coat,
But be sure they are deserving,
Or they invite the Krampus,
The dark element of the holiday season,
A mountain of matted fur and goat horns,
Eerily shrieking basket upon his back,
Hooves upon the perturbed snow,
He likes to punish those bad boys and girls,
The ones who spit and mock the infirm,
And purloin them from their sobbing sires,
So young ones,
You better be good,
Show respect and eat your greens,
Or he’ll chase you giggling all the while,
You won’t be spared the birch rod,
And be whisked away by cloven hoof.
Stories are kept upon a knifes edge,
Stashed in libraries laid on precipices,
Entropy claws out at them,
A howling void that knows only hunger,
These repositories are locked by closed lips,
The only keys are held by our elders,
To be passed down father to son,
Matriarch to daughter,
And as the adage utters,
Each time an old man dies,
The library of Alexandria burns anew,
Pillaged by raiders of time,
And the stories are gone,
Wisdom lost to the pyre,
If not passed on by generational torch.
Down those hospital stairs,
That chilly room is a sterile graveyard,
Clad in cold iron doors,
In place of stone markers,
Names replaced by codes on little tags,
Souls preserved just past the point of death,
Their stories will never rot though,
Even entropy can’t rewrite time,
This body here was a tyrant among tyrants,
This one has saved orphans abroad,
Over here we have an artist to succeed Picasso,
This one here was a master thief,
The lights behind their eyes are dark,
But these husks are still receptacles of stories,
People reduced to their bodily memories,
Held in iron caskets,
To be burned to ashes,
Or rusted away by time.
WorldofHarley 