Fading Tapes and Broken Memories

I knew you fourteen years ago.

I spoke to you all those years ago.

I looked up to you like a hero.

I loved you fourteen years ago.

I lost you way back then.

And sometimes I can't read the opaque ones and zeroes.

 

You used to be Dad, now you're just dead.

What used to be light, now lies in shadow.

It must have been bad, cause all that is left are the tapes in my head.

I remember a tape, of a bloodless battle, screaming and yelling, smashing and breaking.

I didn't know it was seething with fate, seeing everything infront of me in a shade of red.

I didn't know what it had foreshadowed, that night of a hopeless battle.

There's shells on the ground, there's blood on the shed.

I guess you thought you were better off dead.

Now that tape is a broken memory, the words hardly heard over the tapes mourning rattle.

 

Another tape begins to play.

I can see you there cloaked in shadow.

It seems you're not alone, another figure is shouting with you.

She was my mother in tearful tone, unprepared for the sorrow she'd know.

 

All I knew was a perfect picture of you.

Could you blame a child facing the unknown?

I just listened and stared, I never knew this tape would spell the end of you.

Soon the tape would show your tomb.

It was where I had lived but it was not my home.

I know you were there all alone.

I know you reached out but they left you alone.

Sending a call to forces unknown.

There was never a tape showing what happened in front of our home.

I'll never know the truth it would show.

 

There's another tape but the picture is blurry.

I see you there as cold as stone.

Lying in a box I cannot describe.

I see a blurry face not really your own.

Now I know what was hidden under your clothes.

Something was buried deep in your core.

It was not alone but among its leaden brothers.

Under that shirt were holes unnumbered.

The bullets were buried under the surface, and soon you would be too, destroying my mother.

I wish that I could remember your frozen face.

But the years did their number on all of the tapes.

 

I sit here now trying to remember.

But the mirror is shattered beyond repair.

Broken memories pieced together.

Those tapes just keep skipping, the memories blur without you there.

The gears are worn, the film filled with dead air.

The memories I have won't always be there.

The tapes are fading like the blood on the ground.

 

Your son was abandoned in a world unfair.

How is it fair when without you here

all that I have are memories fading.

Most of the tapes are beyond all repair.

Those memories lost like the tapes in my mind still burning.

Leaving behind nothing but dust.

How poetic is that, these tapes in my head will be just like you.

All that will be left is cremated dust.

Remains of the memories that picture my father.

If memories did not fade to dust I would always hold on to you.

But the man that you were is no more, I try to hold on but the dust cannot be contained.

I truly dread the day when nothing will remain.

 

Alexander J. Wolfe

In memory of Mahlon Ray Wolfe