Andrea Gibson - Sleeping lyrics

When the flowers were stolen from my uncle's grave my grandmother drove to our house and collapsed at our door strangled as an empty Christmas stocking wailing for her piece of coal I have never seen a person so finished with God Her face was a ma**acre of grief Her cries like shoveled granite chewed through her shrilling throat All they left was the flag, she kept screaming I thought her lungs would start bleeding It scraped my chest clean Hollowed me for weeks Our house was the echo of a mother clawing the floorboards for her dead son a downed forest in her nail-beds. At night I obsessed over how long flowers might survive in the hands of thieves Spent a month scouring for answers in our basement in the photographs of my father in Vietnam He was as thin as a blade his eyes unfiltered as the cancer they were given for free Anyone could see, but the freckles in his shame, that war was no place for a soldier The heart is no place for the talons of the kind of secrets you can only keep in the same chamber you will keep loaded to keep your hands from shaking the ghosts of dead children awake. My uncle wasn't k**ed by a bullet. he drank himself to sleep trying to drown out their tiny screams. My grandmother followed him to the grave like every mother does. I keep thinking of them today As I sit in my parent's living room My father has been home from the hospital for a week but I was just told he spent 3 years in a field of agent orange but is refusing to accept his 10% veteran's medical discount because a true patriot knows cost of war. pays for it himself. I have written this poem before but always through a window never through an open door. I find my mother by the stove stirring spaghetti sauce from a jar. I have never heard her breathing pull this hard. Earlier, in the car, while my father broke down she turned up the radio dial to save him the embarra**ment of his whimper The radio was playing “I Wanna Sex You Up” We listened to it at full volume for three minutes it was f**ing hilarious how none of us heard the word I don't hear the words anymore. The president announces the end of a war and I just stare at my mother's eyes as my father's face falls into the trembling trench of his hands, like a boy fresh out of bootcamp who has just dropped his gun into somebody's cradle. When a war ends, what does that look like exactly? Do the cells and bodies stop detonating themselves? Does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? When the sand in the desert is melted down to gla**, and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does a white flag make for a perfect blindfold? Yesterday I heard a story about a 6 year old girl in Iraq who can't sleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse If you told her the war was over, do you think she'd sleep? She's seen teeth rip through a ribcage and swallow a heart and I can buy dog tags at the mall, I can buy camouflage at the gap, I can stare at the Vietnam Wall and forget it is missing the 2 million names of the 2 million vietnamese slain So I can certainly forget about the little girl, her dog, the neighbor, and whichever soldiers we choke-chained in the opposite direction of god. At 4 AM I find my father in the living room the news caster says that the number of US soldiers k**ed in war this month was outdone by the number that came home and committed suicide. Outside, there is a flag waving from our front door. My father picked it out as carefully as he picked out my name when he built our house. I want to tell him that I still build my spine from the clothesline that holds his work shirts. But I know I'd start crying I am exactly like him. We both have wrinkles around our eyes, a hundred years older than our age. We both carry ourselves like ambulances with someone dead inside hoping we'll get there in time. I didn't get here in time. This house echoes like an empty canteen. flowers don't survive long in the hands of thieves. So much is wilting. I look out the window . My father's flag is a glow in the moonlight. I remember something I was told many years ago: I was told in World War II, 80% of us soldiers could not bring themselves to k** an enemy soldier they found sleeping. Sleeping. I want to ask my father if he thinks that is true, but I know he won't sleep if I do. And he needs to sleep. God knows, we all do.