an old writer and his words

  • WHAT ISN’T LEFT BEHIND

    When a poet dies they will be mournedby those who loved them,those who admired them.Obituaries and eulogieswill be offered, tearswill be shed and memorieswill begin to slowly fadeafter the short possiblesale spike has run its course.I am no differentthan all of the other mournersbut I take an extra momentto mourn all of the wordsand the…

    Lou Faber

  • NO AUDITION

    It was a roleshe never anticipatednever wanted, leftto her sisters to carrythe genetic line forward.And she spentthe last half-centuryof her lifetrying to forgetthe role she playedand had to abandon.Although she now istwo decades goneon the second Mondayof May I now stopbless her and mourn herfor performing the rolethat brought me into being

    Lou Faber

  • FAREWELL

    Is there any good way to remotelyannounce an unexpected death?When our mother died, her son (mystatus as a son then in flux althoughI wouldn’t discover that until later)opted for an early morning phone call,cursory, the time, the cause, its suddenness,and then assigned me to write and pay for the obituary,which he finally approved eight drafts…

    Lou Faber

  • STILL MOURNING

    I think about you often, lying besidemy grandparents on the hillsideoverlooking the Kanawha River,bathed in the utter silencethat only the dead can clearly hear.I think of you more often than shewho replaced you, she who laterreplaced me with her own, Ian adjacency, still useful butno longer fully or truly valued.I think of you lovingly, knowingfor…

    Lou Faber

  • SUZY

    What do you sayon the loss of a child?We sat in the loungedrinking a vile potionfrom a hollowed pineapple,giggling insanelyfor no reason.We wandered the tunnelsfaces painted,clowns in bedlam.We lay togetheron a mattresson the floor and listenedto Aqualungmy arms around youboth, but sleepcame slowly and we talkeduntil night ran fromthe encroaching sun. I can feel her…

    Lou Faber

  • MY SORT OF SISTER

    I don’t remember her crib,but it was probably the one that Ihad only recently outgrown, butthe wood was polished pine,the rails topped with plasticthat I had dented with some cribtoy or other, the mattress soft,a mobile hanging off the end.She cried a lot at first, and mothersaid that was what babies did,but she said I…

    Lou Faber

  • IN THE PROPER ORDER

    You would think that when you have hadthree fathers they would have hadthe decency to die in the order in whichthey came into your life, that is, after all,the natural order of things or the logical one.My original, who I found more than two decadesafter he finally found peace in 1987 is nothingmore that an…

    Lou Faber

  • URBAN DREAMS

    The city crawls beneath youlike so many beasts awakenedin your recent nightmare, skitteringto somewhere you dare not imagine.This is not your city, it could never be,for cities are mere illusions, veneersfor prisons from which few escapeand fewer still are paroled, andyour sentence only ends in your death.Some say cities are beautiful, butyou know they are…

    Lou Faber

  • HOW

    How are we to deal with a God whose angel kills the first bornwhose only sin was to be born Egyptian who causes the sea to wash over an armydoing the bidding of a despot orfacing death at his hands who turns a city into saltfor the sins of the many but not all who…

    Lou Faber

  • LISTS

    The list seems never ending. He carefully checks things off yet for each item that comes off it seems two or three are added. He knows he shouldn’t complain. He is not a complainer and he is one who completes tasks so if it is on the list he will take care of it and…

    Lou Faber