i wonder if you're flying

"It's ok to be a mess. You're living"  
 
Tell my father that I've become a feather;  
I've been brushing my fingertips against  
the soft contours of an airbrushed sky  
and curling my shaking hands around  
an infinite sea of electronic clouds  
in hopes that I might heave myself up  
before the universe is reminded  
that I'm reaching for smoke  
and that we all have to die  
before we can learn to glide  
peacefully.  
 
Ask my father if he ever felt a schism;  
I saw sweaty jigsaw pieces in a mirror  
where my face should have reflected back  
brown eyes in blue remembrance  
and stretched dry lips that concealed  
tautly clenched teeth  
paranoid and mimicking broken gears  
from the staccato of a deepened heart beat  
desperately straining to find comfort  
in a flight only the dead  
can get high enough to find.  
 
Father,  
explain to me how messy your soul was in life  
before you made a clean cut in death  
or in the very least  
how you used to brace yourself  
every time the smoke clouds slipped  
like your beloved through a tired grasp  
because I'm tumbling back to earth  
faster than the poetry in a bump  
can speak to me of family values  
and I'm afraid of crashing into that same hole  
I hated you for digging.