| Uncle Bob's Funeral He lay there, too content my uncle, although he was so transformed I had to search my mind to remember what he was really like; to me. The skin around his once bright eyes hung down like the leaves of a dying tree and his lips were sewn together I could see the thread darker than his skin like the leather upholstry of a faded car it wasn't him anymore, he was gone, he was empty. The grim reeper had come like a garbage man and chucked my uncle into the back of the dumpster like all the others and left my uncle's body to waste like an empty trashcan. Someone came over to smooth the ripples out of his robe so they could close the casket. His daughter came over and noticed the dirt under his nails. It was from his garden. "Now his garden will be with him forever," she had said and she kissed his hand, leaving a trace of lipstick like clusters of tiny blosoms emerging from his skin. She cried and I'd always known she was my cousin but I never thought about him being her father. And I looked at my father telling stories about he and Bob growing up. I cried then and took his hand. They closed the casket to forever lock my uncle in, only he wasn't in there. He was in the room, raining from the ceiling like the tears in his granddaughters' eyes. (This poem was also an assignment given for me to "copy" another's style, only I can't remember who's. The assignment came during the same month my Uncle Bob died---the poem is not fictional---which was also the same month as September 11th.) |