Waiting To Be Seen

I touched your hands as you lay there,

though something was missing. Oh, I suppose there

had to be - you being dead and all. And me

standing before your casket, a hundred pairs

of eyes on my back; wondering how I would

react, what I might say. A brief explanation

perhaps for why I stood three days in a corner

watching everyone come and go - saying little.

.

Seeing the grief. The heads down. The lips

moving in prayer. The eyes flooded and unseeing

as some distant image of my father and this

person appearing in situ and me thinking -

who is this guy? Why didn’t he come around

when you were alive?

.

You were so cold, Dad. I wanted to shake you.

To lean in and say something mean. Fuck,

did you have to go so soon? No last words.

No, I love you.

.

You hit the asphalt outside the restaurant

like a felled tree. Grabbing your keys

one second and dead the next.

Gone. Eyes closed. Heart stopped. Your spirit …

who knows. I stopped listening to the priests

long before this.

.

I could smell the Old Spice on you.

I suppose they did it to make it seem

like you were still there. Still some part of

you remaining behind - just in case anyone,

you know, needed reassurance that you being

laid out in a coffin wasn’t proof enough that you had

died.

.

Sorry, Dad, didn’t find the whole funeral thing

appealing at all. Standing there. Waiting actually.

Like the Vikings waited on the bow of their ships

so that others on land would know they were real and

not a spirit come to harm them.

.

I waited for someone to notice that I was falling

Into pieces. That I had stopped tasting food. That my

dreams tried to remedy what no one else

seemed to notice - that a child hurt as deeply and

as painfully as an adult.

.

I was invisible once again. Funny how I adopted

that as a superpower. Standing there, all six

feet and 200 pounds of me at 13. Looking the man,

but not one at all. Hiding in plain sight.

Waiting to be seen.