So I Suppose You Want me to Write You a Poem…

(This poem was written in October while my mother was in a coma dying.  Just as we see in TS Elliot's "The Wasteland" I wanted the piece to not only hearken to my own feelings but create a conversational dialogue with other poets.)

So I suppose you want me to write a poem about flower petals falling gently to the nightstand of the hospital bed as I sit in Longfellow’s sleepless watches of the night.  What Mr. Longfellow forgot to mention were the buzzes of the monitors measuring the final moments of life interspersed with alarms and questions of when, no longer if. 

As I watch my mom, stuck in a Twilight worse than Stephanie Meyers’, she begins to choke one more time on the mucous collecting in her throat; I feel as though I have let her down by allowing her to live like this.  For Cummings you were wrong telling me death is strictly scientific & artificial & evil & legal for that is the life I am forcing my mother to live and death is the natural gift that I offered her only after it was too late.

I am sorry Ms. Dickinson that my poem lacks the formal feeling that you speak of after the great pain but I’m not there yet.  I sit in the hospital angry- helpless- wishing I could be anywhere but there.  I live in a fucking hell that follows me wherever I now go.. 

There is no way to describe in a poetic way the shitty way I feel with out you mom.  Neither Longfellow nor Dickinson can express the pain it is to watch you in the realms of where life meets death and peace cannot be found.  For perhaps Frost speaks most clearly the doctors have placed you in “the dark of ether” nevermore.