Misery looks like my mother in the Harbor Hospital waiting room on a Tuesday night after work, like the widened eyes of my fourteen-year-old cat watching four towering strangers carry my father out on a stretcher. It looks like Chinese food, spilled and forgotten on the floor, rice and shrimp smashed by black boots and going raw, like buttermilk icing on my birthday cake, uncut and melted, like the inevitable condolences hanging off the phone. Misery smells like unchanged cat liter, like cigarette butts burning through the silk velvet bed sheets, like saline in the back of the ambulance where the last warm sunset of September twelfth is seen before the doors close for good. It feels like broken promises from the ashtray that I find under his boxed collection of wrist watches and polo glass cologne. It sizzles like regret when I stub out the last cigarette, recently lit, and within less than a click, spark and ignition, the last of his today has caught up with our tomorrow.
What a gripping poem, Daniel! Real, tangible sensations and lines that pull deeper meaning out of the preceding ones.
Love it! So edgy. I've been looking to read edgier work. It speaks to my soul and gives me inspiration. You include odors and textures which I adore in poetry. This really touched me. I could feel it.