untitled.

I left the bowery poetry club last month feeling inspired for the first time in years. As I walked around the city trying to let everything I had just heard take root, I wrote a poem...on my blackberry.
Its the first thing i've written since i stopped writing in 2010.
i'm also pretty sure its the first poem i've written since my poetry workshop my junior year of college.
it is about my mother.
& i wrote it with every intention of keeping it to myself, but i think i owe it to her to share this one.

so...

My mother exists to me now only in memories
But that does not make her any less of a woman.
She loved me with everything she had
I never loved her enough & I feel it now in my chest - all my breaths are shallow.
Ask me about her now & as tears form in my eyes I will tell you how I struggle to remember the sound of her voice, how i squint to remember her facial expressions, her thick lips, & her wide eyes.
My mother exists to me now only in my memories
& to my father in my hips when he tells me that my pants are something my mother would wear
in my tone when I have reached my limit & anyone & anything pisses me off.
In my eyes that are big & round like hers
In the scent i wear - he doesnt like it, so i don't wear it anymore.

Perhaps she exists in my sobs. I cry hardest when I think of her. When I think of memories we will never make, the time we'll never get to spend together. The husband she will never get to meet, the grandchildren she will never get to hold - my children.
How can I bring them into this world knowing that in an instant I can leave them alone & incapable of ever getting a good nights sleep.
Unable to find peace.
Needing warm milk & a lullaby.

So okay my mother exists to me in my anxieties. in my fears of after life.
In the simultaneous heaviness & emptiness in my heart.
In the words that I cannot speak.
In my regrets.

Theres no going back

Only forward now & it hurts to take her there
but
she died for me
so its the least I can do