Waking Up to a Wake

:reprint of an old blog:
.
(Two Deaths)


i.

Weakened by my own fears,
I heard the morning hysterics
of a girl bereaved,
outscreaming the banner
news of the day:

mother is dead.

My thoughts devoid of tears,
echoed against the mosquitero walls
and hummed lullabyes of one sunrise:
I, awake,cradled past in the bliss of a dead womb,
watched mysteries of orphaned dawns
unravel slowly to a twilight birth of a frightened youth
creeping away to a dark somewhere.

ii.

Unread in his eulogy for the dead
were prayers to bury his own guilt;
his eyes, evasive of glossy reflection from a casket
shooting at his face, lost focus on one triumphant
difference between his truth and a dead man's dreams.

He, curling up nouns, piecing up memories
only he can recall now recites stories
he should have written before, unconsciously yet
he begs for critiques his audience prepare to write:
as gossip news,
as editorial pieces,
maybe as verses.

Maybe like this.

But none was ever transcribed,
no words in black duplicated voice
prints of the rites of grief;
the curtains fell even before the clock ticked
to the mourning show of strange characters
lost in shuffled cards and dripping beers.

In my father's wake,
rituals got interred first.