Broken Record

When I was a child, the only thing that skipped was the broken record of anger.
My future self circling above our family’s dying relationships like a buzzard in the desert.
And now my vertebrae stick out like mailboxes, waiting to be stuffed with letters of support.
It was your hip that bumped the turntable past that scratch and back into the groove.
Now the needle carves circles making music leading to a finish.
I’m a memory from the wrong side of those tracks on your arm.
You lived life like it was a race and it was you crossing the finish line before all of us that showed me, in a way that wasn’t on television or in the movies, that young people also have a talent for dying.
The autopsy said that three letters were running around in your bloodstream that would have stole you away from us anyway so you took seconds of the taste of your own medicine and years away from the rest of us.
Ever since then and in an extremely personal way, I’m living for those people who can’t.
Someone once said that we are dead before we’re born and we’re dead after we die so when you think about it, life is just a brief respite from death.

Sparkle.



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