Some nights she stays over,
Lays in my bed singing me to sleep,
Warm breath on neck, wrapped in arms
Some nights she wakes to find I’m no longer in bed,
But curled up something awful
On her sofa
She asks me why I tremble so much in my sleep
I have no answers
At least none she could bare.
She wants to know what I am so afraid of….
How do I begin to answer that?
Some nights after sex she asks
What I am thinking about
And why I’m so quiet
And if she knew how much time
You spend in my head,
I’d bet the farm that she’d ask about you too.
Some nights she says that I shouldn’t be scared
There are things that she has no right to say
Last night she had a dream that I killed myself
And she confessed how much she worries about that
She says that I’ve been drifting out too far
And she’s scared that before long
Nobody will be able to reach me
And I’ll be gone forever
And that I shouldn’t spend so much time alone
And my drinking has gone to far
And that I should stick up for myself
And that she’s worried
And that she wishes I would answer my phone more often
And why am I always staring off into the distance
And….
Well you get the point
grieving under graveyard skies
the vacant lot behind my eyes
littered with old memories
photographs and such debris
in seasons seeming ever dark
the hissing of the trailer park
and crackle of the dark yard leaves
the gravel roads that comfort me
A drink to calm a shaking hand
one more for the strength to stand
the ever yawning time of day
stretching ‘cross the lonely driveway
stomachs torn like broken homes
reality’s a silent phone
summer courtships left for dead
aching bones in aching beds
and when…
will morning come?
and when…
will mourning pass?
it’s never ending most nights. this sums it up:
The Deep-Yard Dream by Matt Milla
Most of my dreams are robberies
The family dies the child flees
Through backyards filled with enemies and
Fences fleshed by panicked knees and
Freedom is the deep-night there
The hurried-flight emergencies
Hospital-hell tragedies are finding me in countries
So far from my home…
The neighborhood is ceaseless where
Backyards kiss like memories and
Nothing is like the hot nightmare of
Hearing them in melodies and
Dangerous cars pull in our driveway
Blast their brights into our windows and
Though they don’t have guns or knives they
Fill me with a fear that takes me
So far from my home
So hard
The night’s grown
And it seems to holler and glow…
So when the backyards finally end
You’ll find me on dark-highway, send
My fear to all the highwaymen at
The foot of the dark-highway bending
Back into a home again
A driveway lit like a dead-end for
So long
there are nights like these when the wind blows and i am 7 again and my mother is still alive, sitting at the other end of the couch smoking cigarettes and sighing in the stillness of the night with the lamp above her lit just enough to illuminate the pages of her novel and cast a dull sleeping shadow across the living room into the room where my grandfather passed on a winter morning when the christmas decorations still gave the walls a sense of false cheer; i hear my mother often in my sister’s voice, the abundance of life’s essence that has always escaped me. i am sleepless tonight in the home of my childhood headaches, surrounded by all of these ghosts who drift past me even as i write this, they are my comfort and before the snow comes i will bring my mother flowers….and i recall now one of the songs she used to have me sing for her:
she was fond of pretty flowers
i recall she used to say
when i’m gone son please remember
a pretty wreath for mother’s grave
those saturday mornings on her porch, her morning sanctuary, coffee cups and ashtrays and patterson novels. when it was cold she would say how the smoke rising over the tree line from distant chimneys made her homesick for tennessee, and i would play hymns on my banjo and she (being her father’s daughter) always could name the song before the first melody was complete.
i’m going back to bed now,
cherrish your ghosts.
jesus this is so stressful, god!
in other news, the levy broke today and everything came gushing out in the middle of the night when the lights along washington street became dim, and all of the voices of my childhood shook my bones. i pine for things that are gone, never to return, i become optamistic over the possabilities ahead…breathe my boy, breathe.
in other news, the air got cold the other day, leaving me heavy and sore. i think of my mother more now than i admit to anyone. i keep thinking about christmas coming up and how my mother would call me on various tuesdays in december to tell me that charlie brown christmas is on or to brag that she is watching the old black and white version of a christmas carol. i feel alot like scrooge anymore. the way he felt after losing his sister. there is a certain bitterness that overcomes you and it’s hard to swallow down or to breathe. i pass the time with guitar chords and crushes (both outgoing and incoming which pass eachother like trains in the night).
other than that i’m ok.
some days meander like the roads out near where i was baptized as a child, rolling fields settling into the sleeping river that ran through my grandfather’s childhood. when i was almost a man, an airplane fell to earth in that field and no one survived, and i can’t help but think of those of us who were taken under into our faith that day, none of us survived either. we grew older and desperate, quiet men leading broken lives with telephone wires (makeshift bridges) spanning years and miles, weary ”hellos” and lonesome breath of cigarette smoke hanging above us like some sort of reminder of the impossibility of sainthood or even simple happiness. and all the while we pass the hours heavy with duty and a shame that the river water couldn’t wash away, and no fire could burn clean.
