A Merry Kah

I watched, as mother sobbed,
groping at the air for whatever particle of hope was available.
I watched.
A pitiful tear ran down her pallid face,
betraying its trek with a glittering trail
until the drop came to cease at the climax of a jagged, weathered jaw.
I watched.
The candlelight did little to deceive the eye
as is usually the case;
no, that day her light shed truth;
or rather, an eye saw through.
Be whatever the case,
I watched.
My eyes shared no remorse;
my tears betrayed no cheek.
Their instigation slept under dirt.

The past slammed shut;
knob in hand, and no thought in mind.
The truth, I could see beneath the threshold, died away.
Dear God! was there a terrible ejaculation of thunder
when that tempest saw the dark of night.
Yet, my ears remained sealed;
No nail in this calm of evening was to pierce my resolve;
No tempest, dormant since genesis,
waiting for just as long with axe in hand, to shorten her bastard son by a foot,
shall bind, in similar fate, these emancipating feet.
The past shuddered, but its hinges persisted
as panel to back I reveled in my sublimation.

I’ma leaving t’morrow,
and I think ma dis’proves.
She could only watch.

The she-squall collapsed,
the puddle of passionate energy she’d managed to preserve
over the last decade of decadence
having all evaporated in a volatile fury.
At that moment,
having been granted an expected miniscule amount of downtime
in which to revel,
I unlatched the entryway to my future
as I have observed it so for the last twelve years of my proxy existentialism.
For just that long this rite-of-passage has been sealed,
For just that long…
since he shoved a leg into the side of reality,
and proceeded to climb into its stomach.
I planned to find where he’d been defecated;
such a goal was more appealing than playing brother
for an audience that lost its touch on the plot after Act I.

In fact, that’s all she had done since his flight,
watch, and never see;
a rock on the face of a festered portion of unrecognizable earth.
Her boys were her sweet and lovely crutch,
We were her care, incapable was she so.

When too taxing became her demands,
he made the plunge and smiled while doing so;
though the waters, I was told, were capable of bite within seconds.
I didn’t hear anything from him after that.
The clandestine letters I found in our postbox ceased,
abandoned.
Vowing then, was I, to make the same crusade to betterment,
to courage, to mankind, to manhood, to life.

Since he was gone, she called me by his name.
She ran me on his chores, and boarded me in his room.
She looked at me as she did with him.
But when my actions didn’t fit her liking,
Hell poured from her eyes and dust filled her ears;
but her lips never moved, and I heard no word,
yet she knew, and made it known.
My name was poison, and speaking it rotted her lungs.
No, don’t hate the man’t left you alone ‘th two children,
or the son ‘at left y’lone ‘th a four year old under yer arm,
and a roof ‘bout to collapse over head.
No…
My name became those things. And I became nothing.

Twelve years of talking to myself,
so that my name would not be forgotten,
amounted to this moment alone.
Her fists were too weak to budge the wedge in order to stop me.
The decision breathed cold, damp air across my face.
What is this intoxication that steals my sense of smell?
What is this orchestra that plays for my ears alone?
Dammit woman!  stop yer racket on m’door!

Reminiscing culminated in one sigh,
and one sigh culminated in a heave over the sill.

••••

An ember, glowing with the energy of the sun,
danced with the utmost of grace
on heels of choking, weightless air
as it past but a breath’s blast away
from the glowing face of Abiram,
or Abe as he’s been coined over the passage of time.
From the heavens spewed,
as if from a whale,
a calamity of perpetually falling stars
whose lives extinguished definitively
adjacent the chill of nature’s carpet.
A sleek, deceptive sweeping curl of ashen
fell apathetic across a steel eye,
teasingly caressing his moon of a cheek,
until winding calmly away from leathered lips
as if in distaste and aversion.
In similar fashion, a mane of ash swept in the opposite direction
slicked by weeks of disarray and wan attention

The look that treated his face like a canvas
terrorized the crickets into silence,
the owl into a taxonomist’s masterpiece;
it curdled the stars,
eclipsed the black sky’s only seeing eye,
halted the earth, speeding vastly the entropic tragedy.
Evil poured from the pot of his eyes
and hatred spilled, boiled onto the lawn, decaying the green life.

         A toadeater’z death h’s ne’er been more d’served I rekon.
         Le’s see yah rise from ‘ease ashes ‘th your crooked fingers a
         graspin’ for m’throat like yah did when I denied yo’ livin’.
         I deenyd fo s’long at I done forgot bout m’brief stay in Hell.
         But look ‘ats what it musta been cuz I ne’er seen wood catch s’quick like that.
         O’mebbe that’s due ta all that fire juiz I spread everywher.
         Gravel seethed from his throat
         in a buoyant but black recognition of his twisted amusement.
         To call it laughter would be to slander, into malignance,
         the name of joviality.

Darting a glance over his shoulder confirmed:
the town folk had been roused,
his revelry was to end and his flight would be quick.