Today I wrote a poem

And it died on the street like a homemade bomb crafted with desperate hands

When I hear homemade I think of lemonade and soft hands in grease touching scalps and scabs making pains go away

The faint smell of cigarettes that should have been discarded long ago

But loneliness forces a pack to stay out of sight but nearby

When did home lives become so desperate?

I asked my poem that died on the street while I was racing to my job that didn’t need me but needed the illusion of me by 8:30am

I asked, “How come more dinosaurs died in Iraq so long ago than here? Or maybe they didn’t and we just used all of our dead dinosaurs up??

My dead poem was lifeless when it was born so it was of no use to me as my noisy car flew past fancy cars fueled in dead dinosaurs

More than mine

I escape guilt

I was reaching out to the dinosaurs because they can’t tell us why they are dead or if they had wars or if their president said that it was bad policy to bring their army home

I wonder if they had a president

Or if they were confident enough to know their own voices would be heard

I don’t write poems often because they are so fragile in this world where things die and become fuel for something else

In essence having a second death

These things, as I rush, make me wonder

Will my father have a second death?

Will he one day become the primary source for some brat to drag race downEast Outer Drive (like we always wanted to do) and crash into trees

What will my father’s second death be a tribute to?

So special he was that my poems that die are of no measure to his love

That doesn’t really exist anymore

Not with homemade bombs and children shooting tanks

He had seen this in Vietnam

And now we see it for him in the Middle East

Where I get confused. Where I try to keep up. Where all the names start to make my head hurt. Where I don’t know who is good and who is bad anymore.

I know that my father didn’t talk about Vietnam. Not the children. Not the food. Not the screams. Not the people who didn’t come back.

He only said, later, when my friend went for her honeymoon, “Why would anyone want to go there?”

And I wanted to wrap my arms around him then

But who wraps their arms around a man who’s grief is strong like steel and bullets and machines

I melt his heart as his daughter

Not as a caretaker

He melts my heart as a father and a man

My dead poem whispers the keys to life as the breath fades from it.

It has given me this vision of my father, immense, wondering freak vegetative contents

Looking for some place to rest forever so that he may give me something in his second death

Me?

I just keep circling the street looking for a way to give him something in a life that has now passed with such speed

Cutting my wrists hoping the words that pour out will give us all some resolve

But watching my wrists heal themselves

Because my father wished it so

Protection in death

In my dead poem’s last breath, it whispers a new definition of homemade to me:

There are few homes made