October 2024
Bio Note: Stirred by imagination, creativity, and my love for Dr. Suess, I started writing poetry in 3rd grade. I got serious about my hobby when I hurt my back and could no longer work while bending over the massage table. My poems, short stories, and music videos have been featured in The Wise Owl emag, Down in the Dirt Magazine, and Indian Periodical.
What to Do, If in Quicksand
In nightmares, I would fall in quicksand,
slowing drowning in the dream.
Upon awakening, I decided to google it.
Turns out quicksand is mostly made of water.
Don’t fling your arms in the air!
Don’t try to swim!
Don’t toss and turn.
The more you do these things the faster you sink and the deeper under you go.
Lie on your back and simply float while yelling for help.
Just float through life for a while.
You can stay alive by floating.
Surely someone will look for you.
Surely someone might hear you.
Only time will tell.
What to Do, If in Quicksand
Death seems to lurk around every dark hidden corner this week,
like a thief in black wearing a creepy mardi gras mask,
waiting for his chance to steal the last breath of my step father,
and wave his trophy of Oscar gold,
having already proved his swiping prowess,
by taking the last breath of Philip Hoffman,
with his poison needle.
A few more years waltz by, after times of glory and fun,
He shows up to take my mother in the most gut-wrenching painful ways,
Confused, disorientated, she lives in a dementia state.
Nursing home neglect is clear,
Clear as a stain glass window on a sunny day.
Eventually, they let her fall.
Falling over and over again and again.
How many times did I get the alarming phone call?
“Ms. Cedars, we found your mother out of her wheelchair sitting on the floor.”
Crippling disability stops me.
I cannot take care of her myself.
Anguish, pain staking anguish.
Physical and emotional.
I can not keep her from harm.
I am disabled too, because of the army.
Death in a creepy mardi gras mask,
Broken hip fracturing the future
From nursing home to the hospital she goes like
a bright red maple leave that sees it's death
while falling, falling always falling,
from the Autumn tree.
A year passes with black and gray colored grief.
Tears fall like melancholy acid rain falls from a stormy sky.
Falling, always falling from my azure blood shot eyes.
The next year death shows up once more, taking my bedridden father.
Death dressed in black, waving another golden trophy
in his skeletal grim reaper hands. Laughing at me. Knowing he is
always, always the predictable end.
I now wait for him to come for me.
Is Death a black thief with a creepy mardi gras mask?
Or is death a beautiful angel who takes our souls up and away
to a golden paradise of our most beautiful amazing divine dreams?
Originally published in Five Fleas (Itchy Poetry)
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