loss

loss

how do I face it?

when I realised I was unloved as a baby

an unexpected 1953 twin, deliver to a sister, my Aunt , who cared for me those first months

when I failed my first spelling exam

My mother finding the hidden paper took a high heel and landed it on my seven year bold head. Blood and stitches and then grandfather who stoped the beating

when I was caught cheating on a final history exam

then, I lived in the spaces of real people in my imagined words; by giving answers to Jimmy I had hoped to save him from a tour in Vietnam. Caught; he went.

when I went to uni and develop a taste for college women, left boyhood behind

then. I choose Barbara among the dews

when o married at 18 and left Brooklyn’s east 4th street for Bronx

then…

(After several years…)

Barbara told me she loved another; not me, I died just as if I were her friend at Fern Park, Old Orchard Beach Maine, by his old hand

my losses carried me from abysses to my space: a vacuum of empty words; love vacated; a torn, cut life. Leaving closed, closeted spaces I created, and entered, my own abyss- unique and inescapable: loss