Poetry? on the internet? P'shaw.

Both of my parents are gone
Dead is what i mean.
They've been both forever
Since this morning.
Alone in a barren home, full of stuff that made a home.
An unwashed pan still on the stove;
An unheard message blinking red
Red like the blip of a weakening heart;
Yet-to-be-foldeds in a dryer
Adjacent to a bone dry washer.
Ask my why i folded their clothes.
Ask me why all the shirts are hung.
And my dad's shirts
I ironed them on the table he
Sits on sat on sits on still
In front of the TV and
Watched watches watching watched
Football.
Starch scorched through mixed in with
The saltwater taffy sweet tang of
A Desperate and Desolate
Forgotten in his floundering. "Fine."
I'm Fine.
Mother smells(ed) of fiber and too often washed hands.
A quilt of disinfectant and babyshit.
A bed of lambs wool and shirt starch
And for a moment we're a family.
Every memory of homecoming and dinner
Calls through the halls now quiet
But for the serpent hiss of aerosol
and the stutter breath of a sobbing child.

My parents are neither dead nor gone
Nor have they ever been.
We, three of us, are alive
the moment we're gone from work
or school
Or everything else that a life is called
But has nothing to do with being alive.
Every tear shed is fallen for a someday.
today I will have fish in the house
the Home
Of my parents, myself, and our dead dog.

I miss him so much.

Summertime, and the living is.

I found one of these beautiful bastards outside the building i work in. The building itself is half office complex and half art studio so for a moment all i thought of the fluttering heap on the concrete was that it was so much discarded papier mache classwork...but on closer inspection i realized what it was and was immediately taken with the overwhelming urge to preserve and present this incredible little artifact of natures accidental excellence. So now i have, encased in a plastic plate protective vault, a desk friend. I'm hesitant to put a pin through the body, as is (i assume) the practice, but i understand where the impulse might arise: if i secure him...or her, for that matter...if i secure It down with a pin then i needn't worry about being jarred around so much by the unpredictable goings on of a theatre office. already though I've started thinking of this newly dead (2-3 days tops) thing on my desk as some ancient, mummified relic of a time we've lost. when the anaerobic breath of insects everywhere had a deal more oxygen to absorb than they have now and were, by a rule, huge. in my head I'm protecting the jumbo shrimp of the litter.
what really blows my brains out of the back of my head is that there are some people in my office who find Manny (play on the name of the breed: Polyphemus) to just be some disgusting Bug...like he's a horsefly or a dung beetle (both of which i find to be fascinating, by the by, just more enjoyable from a distance for two obvious, if not vastly different reasons).

i'm finishing up the workday that saw me start this blog. go me for blogging at work!