I have a hole in my chest
Where you landed,
A man who could speak more rhymes
Than anyone I'd ever met.
You made me believe I was special,
A star in your galaxy,
And you had me spinning
Through space.
You made me a daydreamer
Because I was less afraid
Of closing my eyes in the daylight
Than having night terrors
Where you were only a whisper
Of the man I remembered.
I remember that it rained that day,
Because the atmosphere was going
On strike against your absence
In my life,
But you were a ghostwriter
On my mother's birthday,
Painting a heart in the sky
To remind her
That it could be easily torn apart
By the breeze
And she needed to be more careful
With carrying it on her sleeve.
I think she buried a piece of it
Under your tombstone
When your body turned to ashes,
But my mother is a gravedigger
During the holidays,
Bringing back up the old memories,
Talking you down out of
Black and white photographs.
But to me, you were just
Grandpa,
I knew you as the man who loved
Poetry and Charles Dickens
But still had storage space
In your heart
For me.
I didn't think I deserved to sit
In your lap when I was the
Young Grasshopper
Of a poet,
But you always encouraged me
To break through walls
With new words and metaphors.
My heart became the Ground Zero
To the disaster of your sickness.
It was a meteor bursting in slow motion
And my mother
Enveloped it into her womb.
The matriarch of my earth
Took in the broken shells,
Collecting the ashes as keepsakes.
But I only witnessed the aftermath,
A shrapnel flying 2,000 miles away
And telling me that poetry
Would be the only way to
Wedge out the lost time.
I feel like I missed
The sighting of something
Earth shattering
Because you left my family
As a Pennsylvania reflection
To the storm you'd created.
I never hit words hard enough
In my poetry to feel like
I could ever wedge out the piece of you
Stuck in my curved vertebrae,
But I'm not sure I want to
Because my heart is a burial ground
Where I keep those I've loved and lost
And there's a tombstone
In the front with your name on it.
I'm sorry I'm not the poet I should be,
And I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance
To say goodbye,
But I promise you,
I'll dedicate every poem to you
Until the day my own meteor
Hits the ground, exploding.