Untold Story

  People describe the the deterioration of Alzheimer's, and I've witnessed it. It's such a sad thing. No one mentions much of the deterioration of schizophrenia. I've witnessed that too - more than I ever wanted to.

Two are the sides
To keep you confused
Two are the ways
To leave you abused
With peace and with hate
But in the end
When all is too late
When days do end
Do you remember the hate

  I learned to walk away, I'm sad to say. There was too large a target on my back. Isolation was how I chose to survive. A place of silence. It was all I had ever wanted anyway. I applied it to everything. Too many times had I found hurt from my mother's disease.

  She broke me with her hate, but I managed to run away, and never look back. Just a turtle in a Florida swamp, and me. He kinda showed me how to build my shell and walk free. History, however, has a tendency to repeat and to beat at and bludgeon those old wounds. Another's hate - childhood should never suffer that, for it does never go away. It stays.

  Then my older sister who saved me from those days, well, she succumbed to the hate. Then my brother. There's a kind of lifelong limbo you fall into where you never let anyone in. Where you guard yourself completely until the end.

  There was never a father figure, and maybe just as well. He was a minister. I sometimes think that maybe his genetics saved me from the hate (I'll always refer to that disease as 'hate'). Then I think of the "wares" he had to sell to make me, then leave me illegitimate.

  Most of what I write about is the pain I've endured from my childhood's broken state.
Even today, there are so many out there that can spot the weakness from the hate and try to add a knife of their own. You learn to become a brick wall.

They push and push and push
They want you to fall
They want you to hit the ground
To see you sprawled, to feed their need
They stand enthralled
Seeing someone else suffer
From their disease

Mr. Gill found me a few years ago. It is why I'm here. He found me beaten from life and lying on that ground. Old, worn out. Physically, mentally and spiritually unsound. His introduction hunted me down, haunted me and brought to the fore .... everything. The example of acceptance and something even more profound - the idea that I was not the only one. There are others. I had been found. Who makes music like that anyway?

  He hunted me down again, very recently. Just the other day. Again, in a most profound way. 'Caskets' was released on the very same day that I received the words, "your sister just passed away". I missed the premiere understandably, but later heard the words:
"I know how it feels when the caskets close
Stories untold on a headstone
For those who grow old, it'll fly by
In the blink of an eye" ~ Ren & Webby

  I've learned to accept over the years, and not to hate. Of all of the horrors of the old days, I can now let them go.

  Who writes songs like that anyway?