Rich: Part 2 - October, 2007

I. I am travelling back to the memory capable of beheading me. There was new happiness in that hotel room, Between momma and I, warring gloom, Until the phone rang--until my mother's voice Seared my ears with Death's heat of choice: "You should go to the hospital, Dad. You sound... sick." I looked up at her. I frowned. "Can I talk to Gramps? Let me talk to him, please." Through the phone line I spoke with ease: "How are you doing? Holding down the fort, Gramps?" He slurred a lie. I stared at lamps. We disconnected when he told me "Goodbye." Never had he told me "Goodbye." So I never thought to tell my Gramps "Goodbye." He cut the cord so I could fly Freely without friendship through the River Styx, never finding a perma-fix, Visiting his grave, crying for my future, and the family that would never suture. II. Richard's voice still haunts the phone line tethering Jersey to South Carolina, where he still talks to the bastard boy as the sun sets over the creaking piers as the War on Something still broadcasts as the history of his room refuses to be hospitalized. His young face stares, patriotic, in the black-and-white picture frame, and we all know that I look somewhat the same. Take away thought from my glassy eyes if it means I won't have to remember the day I personally met Death, now "Reap", hovering over the corpse of Richard, and the days thereafter over family and friends that I failed and fail to save. It's funny how you'll attack something until it happens to you. Until you're driven to a starless space and figure you'll pull an ace: 45 proof and I am no longer aloof.