Dying is an Art - II.

I'm posting the various short poems from an autobiographical project I did last semester. They aren't amazing because I (admittedly) didn't take a lot of time on them. I'll include the description from some of them (since we had to explain them as well), but for some, I'd rather not since they are very personal.

Comments:

This was a difficult poem to write. I knew I needed to include it since it is meaningful, but talking about my father is hard. As the poem indicates, we were close in the distant past until things changed. Throughout my older childhood, I disliked him greatly. He was an annoyance, trying to buzz back into our lives after being the one that gave up in the first place. I remember being at his house, long after he stopped doing fun things with us like going to bank and taking us fishing, and he would sleep all day and make us microwave meals and smoke. This poem reflects the downward spiral of our relationship, ending with a reminder that it was not our mother’s fault (who “kept us away”) but his own for not having a continued relationship with my sister and I. The hardest part of this poem to write, however, was the third stanza. In particular, I froze after writing the line “(why didn’t you stop?)” As I will discuss later, my father died this past summer of lung cancer brought on by his smoking. I have had a hard time dealing with his death because of the guilt I feel for not feeling sad about it. Writing that line was a reminder to me that, in a way, my dad died back then, but his continued bad habits killed my father as well.