My father's obsession became increasingly apparent
with every visit I made to him.
The clocks, their hands,
their beautiful, twisted fingers
dancing to the co-ordinated sound of
ticking - he couldn't take his eyes from them.
Over the years I began to see
his irises shifting like clockwork,
miniature minute hands
beating at the doors,
ticking
ticking
ticking.
They are knitting,
knitting a fabric so tight it's a shroud,
pulling it over his head and waiting
for him to sink into the waters of embalmment.
Epitaphs, mad men entitled to nothing.
He formed the millions into gears,
expectation of a smooth, working machine
which he could grasp in his fingers
and hold up to the ***** sky,
moving, scurrying,
ticking. A better place, or so it seemed
to him, where men didn't speak in tongues
and life answered
to something beyond chance.
It was different when he first came here
but then so was he,
it was a version that made more sense.
A version where black birds with missing
feathers patrolled the skies,
where he ran his hands through his hair
to leave straggled clumps between his fingers -
balding velvet. He forgot
so much more than he had remembered,
even me. Eyes still glazed white
looking right at me, he was cold-limbed
and vacant and filled me with a filthy,
cruel hollowness that takes
and takes, relentlessly, for no gear,
or system, or rhyme, will pull
the books from the shelves. I won't find
a ransacked home with shattered furniture
and broken glass littering the floor,
only a clean, aching, vague room
that is blue and sterile and so empty
it leaves trails of goosebumps
along my arms and burns its way
into my dreams in the depths of the night.
I won't find you crying over empty photographs,
only a shell,
staring, dead, at the whitewashed walls.
~~ Exhume me from the burden of memory. ~~