Hashtag #spoileralert
Hashtag: #spoileralert
– After reading poems by Emily Dickinson, and Tweets on Twitter
My future hides before me;
The ending pre-ordained.
The losses will continue
But bright joys may remain.
My feet will grow more tender;
My knees and hips more lame.
I may remember much;
I may forget my name.
The ending could be sudden,
Or agonies, – and slow.
But life that waits before me
Holds time and love and hope.
Lost Password
I’ve lost the password to what used to be my life.
The air is strange and I’m losing my sense of balance.
I search through remnants in the home I sold,
wondering what to keep, or sell, or trash.
I listen to the chatter of family discord:
recent losses, expected deaths, while mangled hopes
fall like tears, splashing on me,
where I sit, creating a new password.
The Uncertainty of Pain
The uncertainty of pain
breeds hope until
loss
silences gratitude
for what was
and is now gone.
While prayer is grasped
and groped through,
grinding new hopes into
fragments of lesser loss,
the heart
twists
The Waiting Room
In Death’s waiting room, I watch
The receptionist checking files, and
I tell her it’s not me. I don’t
Have an appointment
Yet, I hope.
This one here beside me,
Who is looking away and
Doesn’t know it’s time,
Who doesn’t want to go
Into the next room.
It’s not me, I tell her,
Not me yet, I hope.
Whipped Cream
My grandfather used to say he’d eat
Sawdust
If it had whipped cream
On it.
In my sawdust times
I chase the whipping
Cream
Of pleasing people.
Caregiver
“Take care of yourself” they said
But I didn’t know how
To be
That selfish.
“Like on a plane with a dependant” they said
“And the oxygen masks drop down,
Put yours on first;
That’s being responsible.”
Alone,
By the summer lake,
I feel the breeze.
