I search my thoughts, but find they slip away.
What once was known is lost in the loudest noise.
The child in me had most answers.
The world once seemed a place I knew,
But now its lines are blurred, no separations remain.
My hands once held black and white,
But now they wobble, gone in shades of grey.
The blanks rise as clear eyes leave,
And what I thought I knew has gone astray.
Acquiesced.
Abridged.
Apathetic.
Akrasia.
Eclipsed.
Estranged.
Entitled to me.
Engulfed in your heaviness.
Untethered.
Undone.
Unannounced.
Slowly unraveling.
Lethargic.
Languid.
Loss of vision; loss of direction.
Loosened until gone.
Consumed.
Cut open.
Creature of habit.
Crowded by noises.
Pining.
Porous.
Pascal's wager.
Pouring drops of me into you.
Anchored, tethered, a relic of the past.
I seek desperately to make my final assessment
of My Inheritance.
Who will decide my self?
Me, or the lingering atavism?
The vulnerabilities of the collective lie latent within me–
They tip-toe to the surface.
Ready to ensnare: me, my children, and theirs.
I look back to my benefactors with resentment
Yet I make my own apologies in advance of my own heirs
Tortured by the power of parents.
My head overhanging the undone bed, a hushed observer
I behold the fresh force of life clasped clumsily
between the fingertips of the woman I call grandmother.
Her legacy is my inheritance, yet she fervently
mines my few years of life for a lesson to make hers.
Seated inches below my eyeline, she chews
nervously on the ends of her thick dyed hair.
My wisdom sagacious, her curiosity like a toddler
with ambitions to build the highest tower of blocks.
The insides of my grandmother's mind defrosting,
a decade of stalactites that suspended movement.
Her paralysis an act of defiance against God's thievery;
refusal to participate in a world that denied what was hers.
Once treading in scorn for those who could not perform
her most desired, magical miracle.
Longing for the dead kept her from living;
now, she survives on the miracle of her own beating heart.
A toddler excitedly wobbling as it learns to take its first few steps;
A woman nearly seventy learns life's rudimentary pieces.
She wants to flex her muscles. She yearns to love someone new.
Drops of honey emit from wrinkles collected around her eyes.
Eyes wide, anxiously awaiting my answers--
She asks me how I knew that he was the one.
