NaPoWriMo day 3! The Saccharine

Hi guys! Hope everyone is still going strong with NaPoWriMo if you're participating. Today I decided to write a poem about my mom who passed away a few months ago. The problem with writing about someone who has recently died is that you typically tend to write poems only about the fact that they just died (at least that is my experience). So here is what I came up with:

[embed]https://soundcloud.com/talichaj/the-saccharine[/embed]

The Saccharine

Every time I write poems with you as a muse, they wind up not being about you.

I write about cigarettes, schizophrenia and fever,

or the tumor I couldn’t avert my gaze from quick enough—a mass of execution.

Everything else though, the things that made you, come with an epitaph,

a ceremony of eulogies, the memories of you are an arrangement of funeral flowers I don’t

know how to care for properly, I pretend they are not drying out in the other room.

Your Gone is so much easier to write about than your Here, the bitter of hurt pours out first,

the you I want to write about has settled, like sugar at the bottom of an unstirred pitcher,

I like to keep you-I-can-write-about and you-I-can’t separate, hoping to swallow the whole lot of bitter

until what’s left is the saccharine, that remembering you, all jolly ranchers, and gummy smiles is the only way.