i have been home for a while now.  i had breakfast, saw a friend, saw a basketball game, saw dad's grave, bought some underwear and a sweater on sale that i didn't need at target.  the grave looked the same way it's looked since his name was put on it.  this may be the most unsettling part of all.

i was raised christian, in the land of the sick being healed and the hungry being fed and the stone being rolled from the cave.  and i can guarantee you that lazarus was not more worthy than my father.  so my feeble mind can not understand how it can still be here and look exactly the same.  every time i see it, another thump in my mind, beating out the rhythm of what. the. fuck.

i know that i'll never understand.  even when i come close to accepting the reality that it did in fact happen exactly the way it happened and i was there and my mother and brother were there, we were there and we witnessed his death, and now here we are in this world that in a certain light becomes nothing, but we have to keep going, we're trying to make something out of our lives to varying degrees, and i look at that grave and think, i could also just give into despair and die of grief to compliment this grave.  my heart beats, wha-what. th-the. fu-fuck.  i return and i'm instantly in mourning for him, his absence is the black hole in the room sucking all the elephants up, what does it matter if there's no carpet on the stairs?  that grave looks the same as it did ten years ago.  mom, i love you and i don't know how we've gotten this far although against the grave it doesn't look like far at all.  i'm being sucked back in.

this is all, of course, dramatic.  but i went through a stage of not talking about it.  i kept it to nowhere.  i didn't think about him, but he came into my dreams sometimes.  when i spoke i had something on the tip of my tongue that kept catching it.  then i thought about him, but kept it to myself.  but there were times when i had to tell someone, my father's dead, he died when i was eighteen, but i kept it simple and awkward and short and then moved onto something else.  and then i only talked to a select few, most of which were either strangers or men who i knew couldn't replace him.  and now i am typing about it.

i did write a poem for him a while ago...a long while ago, now.  two thousand two.  it is neither good nor bad.  it is very personal.  it is about him.

on father's day, i wrote this, among things:

this is my christmas holiday.  it happens every year.  i catch up with my family and it's like i never left.

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