When I Think Of A Coma

I think of the days I walk around wavering languidly in the coarseness of the wind,
whisking with the leaves in the breeze, tampering with the thoughts in my head.
                                                                   When I Think Of A Coma

I think of going through agony in the stillest of stillness. In a secluded part of my
brain examining words before they have a chance to speak its depth.

                                                                    When I Think Of A Coma

I think of the footsteps I hear drawing near and I’m inert with my eyes resting on the
front of the classroom. But in all I am in a pocket of my brain with my head resting on
my knees like an upright collar sewn on like a frill.

                                                                     When I Think Of A Coma

I think of me astrally projecting and I hear you all but I am not mentally present.
Touch me and let me absorb the essence so I know humanity is now. Let your
fingerprints linger. Touch to touch. Skin to skin. Emboss on my body. Vibrate your
benevolence to me so I’m aware of the humanness around me. Shock me with your
hands, it’s only the nudge of a finger communicating from the heaviness I feel in
your touch.

                                                                    When I Think Of A Coma

I think of the sorrow I feel that binds me to this world. I hear the sniffle of clearness, I
feel the tissue you dropped brush against my shoe. You had draped that same tissue
around your nose, the hard blow. Please let me be a passenger of your presence, let
me relish in your solitude. Let me not bear in a noiseless shallow mind but the
distinction of a presence that wasn’t mind. So as the waves gyrate and the stagnation
disappears and I blink life into me ..

                                                                   When I Think Of A Coma

I think of the days when I’m not really there.


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The Composer

I don’t remember being in foster care
I don’t remember being forced out of the arms of my father and crashed into the
arms of a man I hadn’t known
I only could remember the arms, the arms of my father that held me when I took my
first breath
The same arms that enfold me in warmth whisking away all my stress
I don’t remember being imprinted on by this imposter of a father that stripped away
all I had known and replaced it with what he knows
I don’t know who this man was
I don’t know the song he was trying to compose nor teach me
But all I know now is the melody, the harmony, the song of my father

That resonates inside of me
Growing up I didn’t know what the message his ongoing chant was trying to convey
“It could’ve been better”
“It should’ve been handled better”
But now I could hear it
In your voice
The rhythm of your taut strangulated singsong voice

The same voice that told me when my mother was out having a good time
Where her tune was off-beat compared to my father’s rhymes
While my sister, her daughter was like a broken key played by a person who seemed
to find a power anthem, in the essence of her screams and cries
While my father was trying to find his voice within the lullaby we gave him
While my mother’s children were in the place of the unknown with whines
Yearning for the skin of the people we called mama and dada
Yearning for the first heartbeats that had touched and intercepted with mine
And I could see the unspoken monologue that painted a picture behind my father's
eyes
The lyrics that scarred him for years to come
The torture that stabbed him in the heart for the word dada to form on my mouth
to a man that wasn’t him
I could see the look on his face that reeked of desperation for the tiny little hands
that clapped the notes to his heart

And this record here isn’t his, hers, nor mine
But the music of a man, The Man, My father
Who seems to have tolerated more than anyone should
And less as the year goes by and time hovers
And the bottom of the hourglass grows more full
So now you see
I don’t remember being in foster care
But I could see how the track maimed my father
I listen to it
The sonata
And I hear it
In his symphony