Everything Matters Nothing.

Everything matters nothing.

Not time nor space shared:

My sister taught me

This final lesson.

The message flew its journey

Our whole lives

Then landed, but

I believe

Her message was always there,

Latent,

Volcano.

Lives intertwined,

Always together,

We two were inseparable.

Then came a change

Named (firstborn) adulthood

Named (secondborn) the following of a cult of

Belief.

She began to take things

For granted.

I just watched,

Looking upward (Erika, watch!),

Like when I was three.

Hands interwoven

With hers.

She began to

Spit on the hands that fed her

But with a smile

And with thoughts of righteousness,

She bled out.

Until nothing left

But the vapors from her stewing

From a distance.

Call it adulthood

Call it the following of a

CULT

Of belief,

Sleeping side by side on a trampoline,

Biking comically in tandem,

Soaking up the sun of a Malibu sky,

Sharing the same womb

Though not at the same time:

Not things of substance.

Not anymore.

The stillness of now

Denies that my body knows

What her body knows

Of my mother’s womb’s

Same ambrosia.

How I took to it,

And grew from it,

Sound, shushed sleeper.

How she didn’t,

Regurgitating in colic.

And if I think hard,

She didn’t leave with a

Curt message four years ago!

She left long before,

Hidden in Pacific canyons

Where strange middle aged women

Teach ‘broken’ adults to drive,

In, perhaps, the hopes

of grandchildren.

Where the palm trees sway

Where the entitled pray

Where kindness is not a noun,

But a verb that tells only the beginning

Of a sad story.

(Hold on to what's yours.
You never know when circumstance
can make it not so.)

Curls on her head

Tied a knot with looser curls on mine

In the pews of a church we both knew.

We whispered to one another,

And joked,

And quietly dreamed

:

Silence is talk.

Everything

Matters nothing.

. . . . . 

Erika © 2016