Fade To Blank

Fade To Blank

They have your teacher locked
away with copies of his work
displayed in a glass cabinet
outside his door,
so he can recognize the room
assigned as home.

They say he can cuss a streak.
He hates noise,
wants quiet,
but loves Frank Sinatra.
If he’s awake he’s
looking for someone to kick—

Don’t get too close—

All the workers know to be
careful ‘cause he is one
strong kicker.

My friend calls
from the still darkness
when the patients sleep,
staying up all night tired
after cleaning houses, in need
of conversation with someone
who remembers who they are.
Remember him? You told me his name.

Your teacher’s halo hair and beard
were still as wild as I recall
in a café where poets drank
and smoked and roared –
so says my friend in her latest
report, grabbing a smoke
outside the view of the cameras
outside the oven warm building.

Your teacher has no memory
of being
anyone we would recognize.
We would be strangers to him
even after many introductions.

But the staff reminds him
he is a poet, a man of words,
a teacher.
My friend told them
this is important.

He hears the truth like news,
sometimes pretending
he believes, because
my friend wakes him
most mornings,

And her brown face smiling
is more familiar than
lost realities.

No expense is spared
to tend the man,
the father, the teacher—
yet time blinks in his eyes—
Expired.

The rhythms of forgotten verse
play angry in his vacant head.

No wonder
he kicks the others
in the shins,
strangers
trying to intrude
into his private stanza.