My Mother
There was a tight dryness all summer
all summer as I watched you die.
Crying was no release as we waited.
Invention was the name of our game
as we weaved a web of fantasy in
a morphined-dulled landscape
where you were invincibly strong
and no cancerous tissue could take you
from me and mould you to its ways.
But the fantasy was not fantastic enough
and reality kept seeping through the
morphined moments we spent together
in the antiseptic hushed hospice
of dead dreams and dying cells
and my undying love.
© 1991