Grief is an Absolute Mother F&$%Ker by Rob Aley
It’s cold fog shrugs our shoulders,
Nods our head
In a
Thousand
Yard
Stare…
Grief is an absolute motherfucker
Mocking normie type things…
Walking down the street now a veil of shock…
Our bodies tick along
To clocks long
Socked/
Out of order…
Time a small child
Lost
In a store…
Grief is an absolute motherfucker
And if the fucking trucker
At the god damn traffic light
Turned sooner—
One moment fucking quicker—
We’d of been home
On the floor
In the kitchen
Making more
And more of this
Constant mess
In our favorite dress up
Adult plaything clothes
With their fucking straps
And buttons and gowns and…
Fuck, who’s making dinner?
Fuck pots and pans and butter
Fuck takeout menus and
Online web design and checkout stands
Fuck tasting greens and purples and hot soup
And looping gray upon gray upon gray upon gray
And… fuck…
Grief is an absolute motherfucker
And when we put that sucker in a ball
In a box
In a plastic pin tagged on our refrigerator door…
Only then can we start to think about maybe, possibly, like… sure someday coming out to play…
If only we could find those things that cover our nose—
Long stocks to warm hand toes—
The closet a crusade from this place…
This constructed wooden holding contraption
Somehow hovering our bodies
Upright while
Blue whirred screens blur-play
Actors and laugh tracks
30 second mind fuck delay
What they say?
Oh that’s funny
And where did they go?
Are they coming back?
Is that jelly mold?
For when grief hits hard
It’s all we can do
To just sit down… in it…
In this precise and exacting shit
And take back the bits
Of our life that were
Ghosted/gone
In the mist that masked our minds from that fucker to begin with…
And people say such funny things…
In a better place
Or
May you somehow find peace
And
I’m sorry for your loss
In these meant well words
We walk back on walls
And wanly wink inward
While our whispers wane.
"Thanks for thinking of me.”
Back in the kitchen
Back on the floor
Wanting three cups of wine
Not one sippy more
Except maybe four
Or sixteen
Or just ten swallows more…
Just a bit to bore the mind that bares a brooding grief sublime
A small taste of you in our cups
A finite film etched in the center of our minds
A grief exact as a motherfucker
Put away
Taken back out,
Whatever…
It’s fine…
For Kate and Laura and all of us when we lose some close .
By Robert Aley