As worry lines start to indent your face,

age fills your wife’s place.

Your beard and mustache start to unravel,

as work wears you down like tires on gravel,
but your army feeble body still leaves a trace.

 

Fridays­ you recoil into the basement with Budweiser,

a rat that lives in the crack of our tilted house.

Only Mr. Jingles seeks you, speaks to you, or can even listen to
the stories that rush out the broken faucet of your mouth.

Now that your cans have stacked up,

my name distorts into something different every hour

and you can’t even tell me my birthday.

Stop smothering me with your sloshed affection,

stop drinking and smoking your life into ashes

because I’m no God and

I won’t have the strength to say

rest in peace.

 

Every day you wake up at the aurora,

drive past the cut throat fields of Indiana,

where your eyes strain and your brain goes necrotic

at the sight of those loading docks or Holiday Inns.

What great lengths you go to

to provide for this perfect illusionist’s picture

that portrays a loving family

where secrets are the foundation to this fraudulent household.
You lose your stronghold when you return,

I lost all respect and the love that I should earn,

so I’ll string together the déjà vu of disheartening words

that you spit in my face

in the four hours you’re actually here.

 

At the end of the night,

when your two twenty-­four packs fade,

I will be the one checking up on you.

Making sure your heart’s still pumping blood
through bulging blue veins

and that hot heavy breaths skim the back of my hand.
I’m hospice,

waiting for your demise.