astrocytes

🇬🇾

[dream6ng]

Pre-mourning

Those little feet of mine wrapped in your hands

Did you gaze into my eyes and forgo your dream

Oh how love spawned an inadequacy

Immediately I knew I didn’t have a courage

To run the gauntlet.

But I did it anyway

Without the courage

My fear turning me into a coward

With every step I took until it was done.

I miss my mother when she’s still with me

I know the pain will be so great

That I will emerge from my cocoon a caterpillar

My trembling legs shaking

Until they carry my forward to my end.

[dream6ng]

Why does fall feel so new

That early dawn with the smell and the chill

And the dusk oh yes the dusk setting sun

Smoke limping in the air

That orange in the leaves singing

Will you remember me

By thanksgiving

The leaves dangling and spun

Round and round

[dream6ng]

One day

I will rest and will they see it

If hazard and home

Never meet .

Forget you soon

An ache sitting in my barrel chest

A bird singing in minor key

Stuck in its bloodied breast

Grab me a scallion from the garden

On this lovely June evening

How full the house is right now that you breathe

[dream6ng]

I can barely stand to look myself in the mirror

The fear is standing still head bent over in front of me

Servile and yet manipulative

When did I become a coward?

I have wasted my fortune in malaise

[dream6ng]

I find god during his lunch break

Drinking a coffee when I stumble through the door

And if it brought me any closer he watched me with tired eyes

And sat me down and knew me

When I was done

He sent me on my way

And I turned and I turned and I turned.

Sometimes in my late nights I throw my shoulder before my neck

And I hurt to know that I’ll never meet anything

That smells like coffee beans or

Looks like a yellowed map of the world

And it accretes.

[puffsaddy]

[papapiusxiii]

From Leonard Cohen’s final letter to his dying muse, Marianne Ihlen. She died in July 2016, and Cohen followed her shortly after, dying in November 2016.

“Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

— Leonard Cohen

[dream6ng]

My brother knows and understands me

And through this he forgives me faults

But if he truly understood me

He’d know I want no reprieve

Like a beaten dog again and again

I crave the castigation that I believe I deserve

For all my shortcomings.

Hate me the way I perceive myself deserving

[dream6ng]

My grandfather left

Presumably to be with his mother

Kneeled at her feet

A young man of 33 again.

The sweetest winds kiss his face

When he meets his mother.

What is it like to meet god

Knowing all your flaws

Understanding you so deeply

Forgiving of all your faults

And then to never meet him again.

My grandmother tells me about her 10 siblings and

About the time she asked her mother

Why she had so many pickney

And how her mother just stared at her

In that hot sun like she was mad

And then walked to the cane fields

To labor with a rounded belly

[dream6ng]

Aamna and azim

16 and 22

Their chair legs met

Before their eyes did.

Azim you will die before her.

My grandmother sits in my dining room chair

Volume full blast

AI voice narrating a love story.

She’s just a little girl, after all

Who they stunted at 16

Aamna, he will live longer than you think.

Oh darling when it comes it will not be so tender.

Beloved, having four children will have changed you.

[dream6ng]

In my wildest dreams I experience fervor of unimaginable proportions.

[dream6ng]

Look

I know that you loved me when I was nothing

Your words sway over the bridge

When I was careening

The bird pluck their feathers

We preen and forgive each other

Little moments seeded that

[dream6ng]

On cocoa beach where the marlin run

I didn’t throw my grandfather’s ashes because

Muslims don’t believe in cremation

And I wonder where you are and what you’re doing

Run with me azim

Us two dolphins in the waves.

Maybe on the beach

Or maybe waiting in a white windowless room

[dream6ng]

Far after it actually happens will you start to realize that you have lost your brother. Not through death but through disinterest. Something so special flexed its claws and ran him through gave him a life he never lived.

You grow years alongside each other, do you exist without your brother? You can go to the past but there’s no one there. But could you have predicted the chasm he would fall into and that you yourself couldn’t pull him out? That someone else’s hand could stay while yours failed?

It happens in increments, I’ve lost my brother in moments and pieces, little bits of straying information. And now I know, it wasn’t me it wasn’t me it wasn’t me

[dream6ng]

On the precipice

Every day a heat, in dead last.

When you dream so close

Who comes to mind?

Your mouth making words, and is it the way

They communicate to you?

So easy to sleep

But impossible to remember

The little affirmations moving your lips

When you dream.

Pray to your benefactor

When he lays his hand on your shoulder.

Will I dream of my mother also

Will she dream of her father

Their steady hands guiding me into parts unknown.

I exist alongside them.

The dreams of the dying reflect the words of the dead

[dream6ng]

I am getting closer

To that thing that will so lovingly take it away from me

Look to your pictures and where the blanket contoured you

And see it shatter in the mirror

[dream6ng]

When we all go

The winds are whistling

And I’m with my brother

And my mother

And my sister and my father

And when it comes I will go.

Peacefully with arms at my sides and

That wretched confusion on my face

But your eyes gazing deep into mine

Etched in my brain

And I hope that where you are is far from where I am

And will you carry the memory of me accepting your gaze

Knowing I went when I went, and that I went with ease

Powerless against the forces that conspired against me

[dream6ng]

Have you smelled the stench of your own fear

Like last night’s vomit but imprinted onto your skin

Anxious wretch whose heart betrays him

And he lays awake in the anticipation.

It was his fear that gave in

But you live with it in the morning

Rotten fetid fear of yesterday

Wash it off and you can become new