Touching Shoulders

Death whispers to me daily

Call it age appropriate

Or mid-life crisis

It doesn’t really matter…

Where that parrot used to sit

Now his shadow lurks in the darkness

These days go by faster

And my work demands more investment

The TV weighs on my mind

And my night dreams go unremembered

I write few and far between

And fantasize without the pen

But I know that death will arrive

Quicker

So I make choices based on what seems to matter

As though I’ll be able to reflect

Even then…

…Forever the fools vice…

I look forward to the morning hours alone with Sofia

With her on my lap, watching TV

Or reading a story

Or dressing her barbies

I attempt to build a future life

As if the world wont cease spinning

I try to love as if selfless

But I can no longer tell if I believe it

Or if the fear has me on the run

I love my love

And I love my daughter

I even love what I do for a living

I just can’t tell anymore if I’m really living…

I go through so many motions

Auto-pilot responses, Unconscious patterns

And sleepwalked emotional maps

That I have started to ask

What is actually left of me?

And I look back into so many years of me

All that exists in the perception of memories

Love and its many tasteless fantasies

Recapitulation in its un-glorious history..

Dostoyevsky once said “the second half of a man’s life is made up of little more than the habits acquired in the first half”

What else is there to say about that?

How true is it for me?

I’ll be 39 in 2 months

Tomorrow 11 years from when she left

And I don’t regularly think I’ll make it to 50

I want to be here for Sofia’s Children

My grandchildren…

But fear is a motherfucker

Without health insurance

Without tireless limbs

Without the aches where I used to play

Without fear…

‘I want to laugh & lie and fuck & cry

I want to tear down all that’s left to hold on to

And one day I want to die…’

So said someone six years ago…

What the fuck was he thinking?

He was fearless, he was Bold

He was naïve, he was young

Youth wasted on the young

Life wasted on the living

Death wasted on the dying

And I pray the angels nightly

Tempting their tortures with my indulgence

My daughter praying their names as unfortunates

Sharing love where love may not be felt

Touching shoulders in the void

But we dream it the same

Entwining our fates in a God unnamed

There was a time I longed to understand it all

Now I long for understanding in camaraderie

No matter how much I dig

No matter how much I believe

No answer will ever find me

Life wasted on the living…

No matter how much wisdom finds you dying

No matter how much pain leaves you crying

No matter how much regret holds you trying

Death will find you

And bury all you carried

Again

ⓒ 2013 Shawn Michael Quinn