She was the consummate cook
Draining droplets of water from deteriorating bodies
Hung in white netted cheese cloths
The spider weaving a web of immortality around me
Using blenders to badger and belittle, mixing morsels of flesh
With caustic consonants, shortening the laces of my breath
Our arguments left an acidic taste in my mouth, with painful precision
Whittling away at worth with dull, blunt butterknives
Mortar and pestles that grind, it was like perforating sheets of paper or pride.
I gathered string, making a concentric circle out of beads of bravery,
It was a necklace worn like the promise ring you had given me.
We were in the same Introductory to Psychology class and
I learned about Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs, and it was
Self-Actualization, building pyramids with layers of my own potential
My chipped ceilings were newly varnished like lacquer tables, with fresh coats of paint.
I used to be a compass with arrows pointing in divergent directions
But now you were also my anchor in a crowded, disembarked port,
A symbiotic relationship, and I was green moss growing on your
Rock of Gibraltar, your numerous coral reefs.
I was sailing on a mosaic of turquoise tiled water
Creating cartographic maps, navigating through tunnels towards lighthouses
This wasn't the limits of derivatives or vanishing points
Stalled pendulums, a respite from erratic oscillations of clocks.
Our minute hands pushed back a couple of centuries
We were clothed with invisible vestments, within a void
Encapsulated by a love trapped in a timeless existence.
She had always been defining dates, like
Gregorian priests measuring years with a crude BC/AD timeline
Not realtizing there were jagged edges to the contours of her landscape
The weather beaten texture of the topography of her terrain.
And when I laid garlands of wreaths and flowers
With sepals and petals draped around her tombstone
Her voice clanged against my ears, like plastic pitchforks
Striking my metallic, resistant cables and streets
Writing her my own epitaph:
My mother, calendar-dependent and devoid of conscience.
Birth sign: Not entered
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