Saturday, January 28, 2012

mach

here's to an endless
black hole, three
cheers for a morphine death
slide your way
through eternity and back,
i'm sure,
smile down (or up
or sideways or something)
on me, okay
smile down and remind
me of the quiet ways
you showed your love,
outstanding man, you
fly that jet plane
fly mach
fly for days, into
the sun and beyond.

~k.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

elegy, interrupted

and so it ends.

another chapter, the next great adventure, kicking the bucket... whatever you may call it, death is looming over our heads, all the time.

ahem. hold on, that was a little too melodramatic for 10 o'clock in the morning.

my grandfather passed away yesterday around 4:10 pm, next to his wife of almost 60 years, his only daughter, and his son-in-law. they said goodbye, they turned on the drip, and within an hour he was gone. just like that... one hour of morphine. imagine.

knowing that when that little needle begins feeding your veins minuscule droplets of clear, viscous death-liquor, you will drift quietly out of yourself; knowing that you have five minutes of savoring the final visual delights of these people you have loved and created and created lives for before you will never, ever see them again, but wanting it to be over because your organs are rejecting life so vigorously those visions are blurred by torture, sifted with white patchy pain stars from a four year battle with cancer; trying to gather the shifty images of the family that couldn't be there to say goodbye, the ones you wanted to shield from the ugliness and embarrassment of a strung-out and increasingly agonizing death.

and to let go... the beauty of absconding, of getting the fuck out of that cancer-baiting vessel. jesus.

the man hadn't had solid food in over a year, and little he had before that over the last four years he has vomited back up. he could barely walk in general, and even the 15 feet to the couch in the living room was exhausting to the point he would have to nap. and what for? to get up and go back into his bedroom again to change out morphine patches??

i called mom when i got out of work yesterday, and i knew when she answered the phone crying. we've been waiting. all of the family has been waiting to pick up the phone to the standard "crises crying" phone call, waiting and waiting and waiting and then when it finally happens it's like

BOOM.

and the people on the street slow down almost to frozen and the sun starts setting behind you and your heart drops an inch-and-a-half in your ribcage, and you want to reach through the phone to make your mother stop crying, to tell her how sorry you are that she just lost her father, the man she learned strength and goodness and quiet dignity from... ugh.

i sat down on a bench. hugged her through the receiver on my ear. searched for words to say to her that would give her some sort of strength, some glimmer of hope, some iota of comfort. but all that came out was "it's going to be okay". an oscar-worthy choice, if i do say. a real gem.

but - it's going to be okay. it all has to be okay, because death happens all the time, all around us. it seems a large majority to happen to somebody else. it's just that... to somebody else, we ARE somebody else, so there's that.

i want to love the minutes i live more... cause when that fuckin morphine drip gets you, it gets you. tip the cup to my grandfather, Thomas Raysor Risher; to your loving, dedicated family; to your allegiance to the united states and for the courage you deployed as a fighter pilot in the USAF; to everyone's life you made better just by being alive yourself...

we all love you and wish you the best on this next great adventure.

~k.

Monday, January 16, 2012

northwest

but i promised.
no mention.
a friend, though?
really?
ugh. i did so good.
til tonight.

~k

Thursday, January 12, 2012

12 hours

these are the things no body says... i love you and i miss you and i can't wait til you're next to me. cause other than that, what do you have?

~k.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

and another thing...

all people can't be as brilliantly open as you, i guess... and when i say "open" i'm saying it completely sarcastically because there's no way in hell that you could possibly lecture me on being "open" and "honest" and anything else you didn't fall in love with me for; now you're angry and i'm sick of explaining it to you - and while we're on the subject who fucking says i have to tell you anything in person? i've told you like 85,000 times in person and YOU STILL DIDN'T GET IT so i figured a phone call would be just as effective, even though at the end of it you said "this is the worst possible thing you could do to me" and i was thinking, no it isn't. i could do much much worse, like i could have cheated on you or told you things like, hey, as a 28 year-old woman, the first gift you give to me probably shouldn't be a shot glass and a tourist t-shirt you easily could have re-gifted to a friend you hadn't see since college or your grandmother or someone you don't see every fucking day; or i could tell you things like, the honesty sure passed your tongue by when the topic of "love" or "goals" or "abortions" came up. no, it was all good on that front, wasn't it? but then i'm the asshole for trying to let you down gently and caving to "talk to you face-to-face" even though we had already had the same conversation three or four times before that but we insisted we could be friends but we couldn't and for some reason, i'm the one to blame.

someone call walter FUCKING cronkite... i can't accept full responsibility for the demise of our relationship because it just wouldn't be true; and even though i'm sorry i hurt you, guess what? take it away, mohandas gandhi... "nobody can hurt me without my permission."

i wish you never gave me permission.

~k.