Daddy
The second to the last time I saw daddy
his liver got the best of him
in the middle of grandma's
thanksgiving ham,
sentence half finished…
He slumped back, snoring
in the wheelchair.
But not before the cursory proclamations:
Kids, don’t do what I have done –
there's the gout,
and abscesses that won't heal.
Hear again
the tenuous stories -
constant trips to the VA Hospital,
the progress of the Hep C,
the institutional conspiracy of organ waitlists…
His shunts and blunts and various means.
Could he hear himself –
his own story,
wrapped in excuses
and extended rationales
of who did what, that made him do
whatever,
or the things he did to himself?
He never actually kicked, you kno –
except those three years he was in the Pen.
Even those last months,
he was junked, snoozing
half-lidded eyes
over
grannie's green-bean casserole.
Smack created and cured his emptiness
for the price of a withered life
and toxin bloated body.
The last time I saw daddy,
4 or 5 months later,
the liver won, for good this time –
his still, placid, corpulence
laid out in Werner's funeral home.
