The Passage of Time

The silence was paper thin, razor sharp chipped in places with a retrospective dance of tongues. A well-used silence, it was an infantry-man’s bayonet poised for attack, stabbing into the tender flesh of a young love newly blossomed now withered to flapping dewlaps of unrealised dreams. Now crushing into the oncoming traffic of bottled up rage, the silence took a moment to compose itself. A deep breath was sunk into the chambers of aborted fights, and then the silence let loose a barrage of words. They knocked him clean off the mezzanine floor to a level below.

“GET OUT!” she screamed!

“I am sorry! “ You whined at a decibel shy of what her ears can pick up from the floor into her writhing frothing mind that had all checks thrown to the side.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!” She bellowed into the splitting seams of your patched up wits, those deserters soon a distant memory at the back of your mind.

“PLEASE!” She rasped as an afterthought that shredded your confidence to tattered apologies, stumbling drunk out of your chalky husk of a mouth. No amount of prodding would Necromance this dead horse back to life. You picked up the disembowelled entrails of the love you once shared. You shoved them back into your skeletal heart with hurried care. The neighbours might snatch those bits and pieces and sew themselves into the folds of her heart.

The silence screeched to a halt as she stormed out from your life, the destruction in her wake held echoes of words left unsaid now lacking, a morbid void wider growing in the barrage of sound. The ticking and the tocking of your wrist watch, an assault of a thousand foot soldiers, now marching in line to the shooting fields, bayonets raised over grim faces and brought down with a roar of young men new to war soon disillusioned their bravado now wavering. 

Thick warm blood soon spattered and spilled, draining out of chambers of your battered heart. In the last moments of the rest of your life, you lay in the muddy fields of miscommunication and reflected upon the deep well of sadness in which you drowned gulping down the words you never had a chance to say to her. All the while the ever present silence looked on, a witness to a murderous crime, observing the passage of time, with a cold unflinching heart of stone. The silence watched dispassionately the last moments you gasped, the bobbing of your throat like flotsam out into the sea, chugged this way and that with the twitching of your limbs. Smoke in your eyes, you prepared for the final jump but still images of her lingered like silvery clouds across the open sky that were slowly drifting, drifting, drifting…

Shooting Blanks

I met you in the cold sour orange fruit juice of my contemplation. You were that sugary unstirred bottom of my ineptitude. I forgot that spoons were made for a reason and spoons were also cuddles, that spoons were warm fuzzy creatures that would grow cold when not minded like reptiles bemoaning the once ever present sunshine. You were that orange sunshine and I forgot to clear the dark cloud that is me, I forgot to stir the juices of our relationship and then it was all over with you at the bottom of the cup and I already ingested in my own permeating dark thoughts. I painted that grimace on your face with every passing day I ignored the bubbling happiness spreading inside of you and before long I had poisoned you against the woman who simply wanted me to bask in the sunshine of her love.

It is my fault that I made you bitter, my fault that I made you stay too long without my caresses that the orange in you had turned to bile. You had meant to open your quirky mouth to crack a joke at my forlorn face but instead you opened your mouth and spat out dismembered limbs of your jumbled thoughts, careening between happy and sad, should I go, should I stay, your delicate hands folding and unfolding with indecision.  It is my fault I made you doubt the independent woman in you as you had to lower yourself to my level and reason with this impossible child throwing a tantrum with his oppressing silence screaming the roof off our relationship. Your eardrums swelled with all the noise and your screams joined the fray desperately trying find a point of equilibrium. Your eardrums burst in a cacophony of shattering glass and fits of jealousy much as your suspicions were all here say. This obstinate child denied you closure, with every breaking piece of our furniture, I nursed a twisted hope a piece would find my head and crush my brain to porridge and brine to decorate this place.

This place was meant to be our home away from home, as a man and his wife have to leave their parents' homes and make their own, we had carved this place from brick and stone to call it our own. We furnished our home in colour and smiles and built a backyard to hold reserves of compromise for the fights yet to be fought, we stored the excess of our love in hidden pockets in our hearts for the children yet to be born but already part of our lives. We built this all, you and I but at the end of the day, the 50 you gave outweighed my own.

I cocked my gun and shot with the zeal of youth and you embraced the seed that was never to sprout. For years we tried to till your fertile fields and for years we went back to our beautiful home, without a harvest to show for the backbreaking work of the two unfortunate lovers in a race against time. I knew the fault was my own because a man always knows these things after a while. I got myself tested behind your back and the result was not a surprise. I had been shooting at my lover with blanks but with intent to kill.

And how do I tell her? How do I tell her I failed as a man? How do I uproot the happiness she nursed in her heart without killing her? How do I kiss those lips without feeling keenly my failing as a man? How do I face my lover with nothing to give…but darkness and loss and dark cloth to cover her head? I am sorry for your loss I would say. Your children didn’t make the trip to your warm embrace, they died in my arms and there is nothing I could do to save them. Would you find it in your heart to forgive me, I am only half a man. No can do.   

May darkness swallow me! 

Memory of my Father

Dear dad, six years have galloped past leaving me in the dusts of time. Six years have seen to it that your memory is but a smoky tendril fading into the everblue and however much I try, I am unable to reconstruct the angled features of your handsome face those rare days you managed to smile. It’s all gone, dulled with un-remembering leaving me wishing for impossible things.

Then perhaps…perhaps…perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore.  What am I left to offer you but heartfelt wishes of a hurting child thrust into maturity without the teachings of time. Perhaps the gods can sympathise and grant this man-child only ten wishes and a boon for a stolen childhood that will never be found. Ever again.

Dear dad, how is the afterlife treating you? Do you get to go out the house in the evenings to smoke your Sportsman cigarettes under the moonlight? Is that even allowed? How do the beers those ends taste? Are they served warm or cold? Do you still fight for the respect you think you deserve even though you already have it safely tucked into your meticulously pressed man-clothes? Are you still the same man I grew up to know like the back of my hand: A nasty tyrant buoyed by the bottle and a thoughtful man in the cold sober mornings craving matooke and liver, hot enough to burn your tongue. Do you miss thrashing the five year old me or were you only punishing yourself? I never held it against you, because in you, I always saw the man I could be. Or not. And is the afterlife all it’s made up to be or is this another lie grownups tell the kids?

Dad, ten wishes and a boon, that is what I’ve asked. If those wishes were cashed in for time, I would go back and fix everything that set the course of your fifty years of strife to its unfortunate end. I owe you that much If not more. You’re my dad after all, even after all has been said and done.

I would go back in time and befriend the five year old you. I would teach you the lessons you tried to teach me in your own twisted way. I would teach you to be brave and honourable and hard as the will of a woman scorned. I would teach you that men are men and have to do what it takes to protect their own. Men don’t fight women, and that should be the first law, never to be broken at whatever cost. Men are born to be free and have to be left to their own devices. Men don’t get lost and should never have to ask for directions. They will always find a way back to those they love and those who love them. I would teach you that pain is temporary, pain is a mosquito bite to be swatted away. Blood is like sweat that needs to be wiped away. What matters is that we are free to be the people we were meant to be deep inside. Excesses of cigarettes and booze are not a man’s way.  A man needs a clear mind to plot for the next day’s forage. I would teach you things, dad, things you never taught me.

Perhaps I would give you a fighting chance. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to die at 50, looking 35 but still wasting away. The last day I saw you, thoughtful and soft-spoken, that last day would last until I am man enough to be proud to be called your son. I wouldn’t have to see people who used to know you as a child but never thought to help set you on the right path. I wouldn’t have to see people who despised you come to put you into the ground. That should have been my job. A son’s last act of respect for his parent is to bury him with his own hands. That failing, I have chosen to bury you deep into the soil of my mind and build you a grave of flowery words and nostalgic half-smiles, those you used to give that keep lingering in my memory of you.

I am your son, dad. This much is true.

Six years left to rot like road-kill, I am finally burying you.