^ Death of a Mother ^

^ Death of a Mother ^

You are tired of telling yourself not to write about your dead mother. 
The provocation is one proclamation after the other.
"I will not, I will not, this is the last time, no more, one more…."
and then you write 'suitcase,' and she's there, folded into it.
She appears hungry on the page,
looking at you with eyes that belong to her mother.
You begin to write, and the words you deposited in her coffin come back to life. 
You let the ink swirls on the paper,
until it runs out of capacity.

There's a grieving son, 
holding his feet stiff to the ground to call upon the stars 
while stars behind his head have begun to count his sorrows.
He watches the guests wiping salt from his cheeks and under-eyes from time to time
and they hold his father's cold hand until another pair of legs enter the room. 
The daughter pets the dog until she can't bear the stench of a funeral and leaves the room with wet footprints.
She looks up to the sky, thinking her tears might go back to the ocean, 
and holds her chest like a wounded pigeon crying in the barren trees after its nest has been stolen. 
The son assumes that the world belongs to him, 
that every hornwort, chrysanthemum, and goldfish will wallow in his hopelessness,
and fishermen might drown in the melancholy of boats reflecting on the sea view.
Claustrophobic nostalgia is buried in their hearts 
as a contemplation of the sadness around them,
because they were the broken armchair their mother used to sit on 
while knitting a shoddy sweater for her niece during the pale winter's noon. 

There is a group of three older men at the funeral service.
Their home-grown palms resting on the dining table where Mother used to serve tea. 
Compressing their knees on top of one another, 
they sit in the most poised manner while feasting on the repast. 
They call time an indifferent comrade 
that pens down a story note 
and leaves with a greeting card for the next child's birth. 
They hold criticism in their tongue, 
mendacious sympathy in their voice, 
deception in their eyes, 
and a fake black suit covering their skeleton that appears remotely remorseful.
They whisper, 
"you will never be anything but the silence your mother put inside you."
Only seconds after, the quiche is served in the perfect shape of a flower.
The dessert is soon disfigured in an immediate eagerness for human birth chaos. 
For these older men are the tilted photographs on the wall of a living-room 
that is often seen but seldom noticed to be set straight.

Empty rooms are another dead thing cloaked in the melancholic verses of Beethoven and wilting notes of Mozart.
The capitalist clock which buys family time halts in the final tik,
and the tok is never heard again.
A cedar plant groans, oxidized cutlery clanks, and smoky cupboards refused to rust under the fungus 
because there is nobody to clean it. 
The marble floors borrow the habits of a beggar to stare at every soul walking overhead 
and finally becoming ignorant to apathy. 
This home lived under the syllables of her name, 
and cremated itself along the creases of her forehead lines. 
It's a matter of the spaces we occupy.
as in this home,
a funeral is painted as a portrait of irony living in the backyard, 
green in the start and burnt in the end.