I saw a man standing outside our local funeral home the other day and my heart broke. It was like I was him for a split second. I stared as we drove by, grasping every last detail of him but no one in the car even noticed him. He haunts my writing.
It’s been a week
But I was sitting in the backseat
And we drove past a funeral home
And there was a man standing outside
Blankly
In black pants a black shirt and a certain numbness about him
Made me wonder who he lost?
His wife, his child, his brother, his mother?
How king had he been standing there?
Seconds, minutes, hours?
What loss made him so comfortably numb
He stood in the heat of a July afternoon in black clothes in front of a funeral home?
He wished he could go back
And say all the things he wanted to say
And he wished it was socially acceptable
To scream them to the sky
The bright, unforgiving sky
Brutality never looked so appealing within clouds
Death never looked so peaceful-
He looked so tired, so exhausted
Like it was him in the coffin instead
Like it was him who was just inspected for cause of death
Metaphorically, he was
A part of him had just been cut open that he will never be able to stick back up
His mother never taught him how to sew
And now it was too late
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