Smoking the Ghost Pipe
You knew I wouldn’t stay.
Even my first words carried the scent of a dream bag packed with leaving.
No moldable child to shape your better life.
You tried
but that breath never took within me.
And so, I grew in a knotted nest of love.
I followed the Happy House Rules as I watched the silenced stories,
The maps of actual life and self
Falling into the dry spring where you led them.
I could feel these blueprints of difference seeking me, night after night
pleading for rescue.
Following their feeble voices, I left
looking only out.
Tracking them far, then wide, while dodging curses of fury,
Your resentments and rage burning me
while still, I never looked back.
Decades of bearing this to the bone,
I found those voices
Beyond your reach.
I was bleached clean,
Finally naked to myself.
And now slipped from the tangles of your needs
I find myself in a place of shock and longing I could not portend.
I find, finally, in my far away freedom, a pull to go back.
To camp by your grave.
In my dreams we sit there and weep together, for both of us.
The spring finally full and flowing,
Washing away all bitterness.
I want to drink from that water sweetened by love and forgiveness,
And hold you tenderly as I would my own child,
In a world where nothing comes between us.
