Hollow Flake Ledge: pendulum traverse

After my dad died when I was twelve my mom went crazy...well she must of been crazy already. No one told me though. So I was left in a big house with her while she slowly dissolved. She tried to kill herself when I was fourteen...I had to crawl through a tiny bathroom window to save her...she was dead I was sure. She just wanted to be with my dad. I guess I understood. She hated me for saving her. She loved me for saving her. It was complicated. I loved her. I miss her. I couldn't save her all those years later. While it is trite to write of such things, and nobody really cares about personal tragedies much, I do care. This is for my mom.

Attempted Umbilicus

It was just a window, small and closed,
as my days had become across that year.

Unlike that sturdy frame, dirty and high,
a single-minded clean sadness hid within.
You, somehow, traveled to the other side,
leaving me to struggle up a ladder to see.
Just a vision of the two of you meeting again,
somewhere on that floor seen through glass.
Where those cold hands grasped for him,
my days were not enough to bring eyes.
Yet I saw you stretched out, cold and content,
breaking that long silence I now owned.
Opened to the wind, that window burned,
searing my growing and mysterious body.
Strength was a question I had asked myself,
never answered until that unknown moment.
As if your still body was a test during this rite,
studied for in books of grief and passage.
My first adult step faltered, mocking infancy,
as I reached for your breathless silence.

Stung by a porcelain anarthria surrounding us,
my cheek blushed from your ghostly slap.
An erasion delivered by motionless tendons,
connected ourselves forever in private violence.
Childhood withered on those cold linoleum tiles,
when I felt the birthing pain of quickened maturity.
Old light flooded my youth through that window,
stealing a notion of personal linear evolution.
I crawled back across that dirty sill and ran for help,
because my wounded umbilicus could not revive you.
After being pumped and carefully prodded in sanatoria,
your body still mimicked death while your eyes flashed.
That wished for crossing was broken by my last act,
young and splendidly reanimating my animator.
You told me that you wished I had never been born,
and the old man who now inhabited my skin agreed.
Still we loved each other as only the weary can,
hands held tight in knowing betrayal of each other.

It was just a window through which a child passed,
I still see him steadied on that ladder without a choice.