Anniversary

Today marks the 12th anniversary of my father's death. It was a very short time between finding out my father was dying from lung cancer to when he finally passed away. I was 19 years old. I had never experienced death before. To deal with the anguish and sorrow, I wrote poems. This is something I wrote in the weeks before he passed. . .

Dying Daddy

Every day Daddy
a little piece of you
disappears into the deep
dark of your lungs,
a vacuum sucking you in-
side yourself, beside yourself
isolated
in your studio apartment
ground level in a wheel chair
hooked to an oxygen tank
like you are hooked on
those damn cigarettes
that bleed from your mouth.
After fifty years, they have become
a constant fixture on your face
like your nose or your blind eyes.
Dangling there, as your life does now
waiting for the last breath,
the final puff,
when you finally put yourself
out- like a cigarette-
the bud of yourself
extinguished.

(March, 1993)