Aura


Everything smelled of paint thinner,
to some degree, around my father
and our house. A foreign perfume,
or a man’s spicy cologne. 

It circulated down the driveway
from the beds of tired work trucks
to the can-full garage, through the yard,
never empty enough to play in. 

There was a lone lilac bush
just on the other side of our fence,
begging me to breathe in her fragrance
every morning, but instead, I rose

before the others to inhale my father
as he loaded paint on the pickup
with one hand, pulled lovingly
on his non-filters with the other. 

Cigarettes, paint fumes, and stale whiskey--
an intoxicating concoction of scents.
They followed him day and night,
and I respected his aura of thinner.

It hung everywhere in the air,
just as a father’s force lingers
forever heavy in a man’s life. 
Strange how our jobs seep out 

of us unnoticed, undetected
except to those who need us.
I wonder if I smell of lead pencils,
new paper, coffee, and chalk. 





Planning Your Own Funeral


Room for one more, the old Twilight Zone 
episode states, inviting you into the morgue.
So many questions, so many choices. 

Do you prefer oak, an ebony urn, yellow irises?
Doesn’t really matter to you now, does it?
Like a dark comedy, really. 

No one died the day I entered the home,
asking to see the funeral director.
An empty and waiting room. 

How to summarize a life? A breakdown 
of accomplishments edited on a small card.
I stepped outside for a smoke to stop laughing. 

When it was done, I headed back in,
prepared to make all the right decisions.
Rod Serling couldn’t have planned it better.