one of my kids was murdered, gunned down, annihilated.
and i effectively, and without, ceremony lost my shit.
his death wasn’t due to some random cop stop
or on the edge of a socially defined injustice worthy of sound bites.
nope. it was just family politics and the weight of dinner plates.
people tried to pass it off calling the shooter a mentally unstable criminal.
murderer, i suppose, has become too glamorous a term,
so we try and justify such injustice by calling it mental illness.

and i lost my shit.

i lost my shit because shouldn’t we all lose it when a
16 year old is cut down before prom and pomp?
having never understood the circumstance of his existence
least of all grasp the multilayered nuances of family politics
that could leave one looking down the barrel of a gun over
the weight of dinner plates.

i lost my shit and…

my mojo went out the door with it.

there was no walking, no meditation, no reiki/chakra movement
that could help me reconnect from the me witnessing the lost of
a child by a mother who dreamed better and bigger and grander
than her mother before her.

i lost my shit but

pretended like i was holding it together while leading entire groups in
prayer circles and investigating the bottom of the rock we all found
ourselves looking up from.

it’s been a slow motion, out-of-body, out-of-mind experience –
this losing my shit –
thing.

i’ve been floating above me while trying to keep track of you and
writing prose to bring us all through. i’d become so full of it

dead babies in driveways,

dead babies left in trash cans,

dead babies suffocated in fire pranks,

dead babies found under the fold of their mother’s arms,

dead babies in cars wrapped twice around trees,

dead babies forced to their knees executed in vacant lots,

all these dead babies forgot.

so by my calculations it was way past time for me to
lose my shit.

how much sorrow and tragedy can one person hold?
even if it is technically my occupation. being an expert on the
excavation of grief, comes with a weight you will eventually
fold under while holding up others.

so you have to factor in the years when your shit will get
lost and extend compassion as you sit starring into tiny screens
never mind what’s on or how that bag of chips found its way
to empty.

your shit is gone

so here you are holding on.
willing it to come back.

praying you can regain some
peace and your mind.

stilling yourself
for next time.