Strange poetry

You had a strange kind of poetry Locked up so tightly within you From the bracing you had to wear In order to stick to their rules Nuns in dark habits Put the fear of God into you And it took years to know The diet of fear These souls were raised upon Terrorising your sister Pushing her down stairs Wrapping the knuckles of the other one As she played piano Telling her Dean Martin’s music  “Was the devil’s music.”  She rebelled But you learned It was better to watch And remain silent And duck and weave as best you could Doing everything you could to “Be Good”

Coming home to an empty house Where latch key hug On rusted nail To a empty void You tried your best to fill with Elton John and Popcorn and Pancakes you made yourself Making sure to clean the mess Before mother came Bernie’s lyrics were like air to you They helped you to breathe In that a huge empty house filled with sunlight Where later everything broke apart in the first room Near the louvre door leading to the long corridor Your sister tried to take her life In 1982 And you struggled to understand How love could lead to this A woman’s body twisted with illness and grief In a wheelchair With only a battered brown suitcase to call her own

When in your mind you see this image now Supertramp plays “history recalls how great the fall can be.. while everyone was sleeping the boat sent out to sea” with the image of her third sons face watching in confusion from behind a curtain as their father sent her away telling him Your mother didn’t want you

Well now it seems to me that all of this pain is the birthplace of poetry and even though this stream of consciousness does not rhyme You know how long it has been that these images haunted your mind And the silent suffering they brought became a desire not to live for a long long time and most certainly to never again see you sis so cruelly abandoned And if for a time your life was the willing sacrifice Is it right now to blame circumstances you made your bed and lay in it and twisted and turned and in the end it all gave birth to poetry As you worked to unlock the door of the past and turn all this pain into some kind of art