Father, Sin and Holy Ghost

I squatter in the catacombs of remembrance. grinding my bones with pumice and chalk for a fine bone dust to clean the vellum bindings of my soul’s revisions.  The scars glitter the ground.   All the others with almost identical names, are around me, enough alike to make me doubt the date I was born.  

Something familiar slides down my face. In your version it’s everything you taught me. Not the Johnny Walker black or the tapping of veins to insert the drip before the anesthesia. Not the betrayal you felt when I dared not follow you. I didn’t mourn that, when later, they counted my T-cells. I just remember you doing my pulse with one hand, confirming the undisclosed second diagnosis.

In the end of this death hall I hear mother’s echo begging me to “Please, buy a dark suit to wear.”