My father couldn't move his left arm on the hospital bed.
He nodded instead, swollen from fluid bloating his adominal set
and all through his chest.
The tubes kept him alive but also collared his neck,
so he strained with his right hand to reach out and coddle my head.
His only son, I stared blankly, knowing my father neared death
but unable to muster emotion as his only progeny left.
I kissed his cheek. He smelled like medicine mixed with disease
and died six days later. My mom by his side had drifted asleep.
This is about the time I'd turn to the funeral service
and tell a story about breaking down crying, consumed by the sermon.
But that didn't happen. My father died, me near turning 19,
my grandmother at 22, my dog at 11.
I don't even believe in a god or a heaven, yet it's here that it strikes me
that not once did I shed a tear without Visine.
I'm an emotional void, coasting on an autism cluster.
A patchwork palaver-pushing semi-person and caustic disrupter.
I've learned to channel emotions through dismantled devotions,
better at handling obits than looking myself in the mirror.
The selfishness seers. I've felt a gradual closeness
with psychopaths, liars and the baddest of culprits.
My lips twist to an enveloping sneer. I try to wash it away,
but Listerine only kills 99.9 percent of plausible pain.
So I tell tall tales and catalog disconsolates
with blue-state sob stories and scatter-shot dishonestness.
It's vicarious masochism, text messages with emojis exposed.
But if I wrote from the soul, the acid would prove too corrosive to hold.
I live through these characters — one week a faggot, the next a whore —
and each piece provides release for personal resentment stored.
So when I cut through the tension's core, my heart of darkness free and clear,
I find it's always easier to shed other people's tears.
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