Canary Cry

By Vienna K.

How do you spell schizophrenia?

My canary cry screams out to you 

My dear father who couldn’t scream 

for himself, the man who was too 

busy with his own affairs to show his love for me. 

His struggling addiction, his remedy of relaxation,

the thing that haunted me most, weed. 

One bad batch and he was dead, bipolar schizophrenia they told my mother, that’s what he’s got.

Take the pill. 

He refused.

Then the hallucinations started

The demons in my room slayed with the knife of anti-convulsants. Why didn’t you take the pills? We could’ve been a family but damn the relationship we would never have.

And now, two years later I sit here screaming into the arms of my sister

Who holds no answers but I know

She screams too, because it is hard to 

Carry the weight of this pool of tears,

This abyss of emptiness. 

The hurt. 

The anger.

SLAP. The pain. 

BOOM. The waiting for a love that never came

It’s hard to say if my pain is masked by unrecognized disappointment

Because he sparked the blunt that later killed me.