Tag Archives: Family

Inquiring Minds, Poetry/Quote of the Week

My Snowman

Leave a comment

Snowman

I find that I can sometimes be a slow learner at things pertaining to life in all its facets, my life has been much like building a snowman  where you have to make three sections to it.

The bottom comes first and by far the most arduous to make….at first, it starts as just a small snowball in your hands, then you slowly begin to pack more and more snow on to it, as it grows in size, you begin pushing it around  the yard to fill in any cavities around its circumference, now its getting even bigger,  you roll and roll again  to get it bigger until you get it to the size you want. You pat and pack, pat and pack, over and over to just the right rounded beautiful shape.  You take great care in its preordained geometry you see in your mind’s eye ahead, and you smile at your growing  conception.

But then, perhaps some asshole bully at this time walks by and  runs straight at you and then jumps as high as he can into the air to come down crashing on your  growing creation…destroying your nice round ball entirely…

You look  down at your mangled ball of nothingness, then up at the wide proud grin of the bully and you kick him in the
balls…. HARD.

****PAUSE LIFE****

Decision time….do you repeat the process all over again or say fuck it  and go inside for some hot chocolate?

You decide to forge ahead, but this time in the back yard away from all the asshole bullies in your fucked up neighborhood of hypocrites of mom’s and dad’s who created such a monster of a bastard.  Pissed off, you finish that bottom ball, righteously bitching the whole time and then move on to the second.

Then comes the middle portion and if you make it perfectly like the first  in shape but slightly less in size for it will compliment the bottom in proportion for the illusion of a very good looking snow-body.  Now,  if you were very ambitious and had rolled a very large bottom ball, then the second ball of snow will be very heavy  to lift on top of the bottom one. But you must lift it …. because you have to put the head on after this.. Because you need a head.

Well most people in life do anyways but some do seem fine without one. They must bump into a lot of walls on a daily basis for without eyes to see you cannot see. Never see.

So if you are strong, yet careful  it goes up easily,   but sometimes its just a bit too heavy and you drop it , or perhaps you hold it just a little bit too tight and the ball crumbles apart in your mittened hands. Now you have to start all over.

FUCK! you yell in the backyard to no one.

Your mother open’s up the back door and sticks her head out, “Did you say something dear?” she asks, clutching against the cold coming through the door.

“No, I did not mother. A raven flew by, yelling it’s opinions at me,” I said.

“Oh, that’s nice dear, have fun.” She said, and popped her head back inside and closed the door.

You smile inwardly. Because your mother can be an annoyance but she checked in on you and that makes you feel warm even on this cold day

So you finish your snowman, humming all the while, with no cussing at your mistakes or your misgivings of the process you just are building your snowman and having a good day.

By Philip Wardlow July 5th 2023

GiFs for your Entertaiment, Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

I know I won’t cry

2 Comments

They say parents shouldn’t outlive their kids, but should an older brother outlive their younger?

Much like a parent, the older brother directs, and protects the course of the younger.

Unlike parents, the older brother can also be a partner, a fellow perpetrator of many a fun misdeed gone awry. That is where bonds lie deepest, where intimate secrets are kept and held between a kin closer than that of the mother or father.

Sharing of sins, and the punishment of those sins, sharing in the joys and adventures that is youth in its whole.

You share a core with that little brother that none may know. It’s unspoken but known to the bone between you two.

To the Bone.

It’s honored, it’s delicate. It’s something that always dwells.

So when you see your little brother, dismal and seemingly damned, fallen and fragile, raging against an unknown foe and miles from the place in him from where he was once was, you know.

Where in the core that you share, now only dwells despair, you weep, and you weep, and you weep in the silence where no sees, because a man doesn’t cry, they simply don’t.

You know you won’t cry as he lies in a casket, all dressed and prettied up. You know you won’t cry when other’s speak of him in passing or come up to you with a hug, and “I am sorry for your loss”

You know you won’t cry simply because you have already cried so much as bit by bit of your little brother was pulled from you, excised with a sharp knife, and put into a blender and pureed to mush.

By Philip Wardlow June 2021

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

The Red Queen

4 Comments

She once sat a throne of bones
and violence, of endings
and beginnings unwinding,
while always seeking a home.

I found her to be funny, frivolous,
fraught, extreme, and sublime
all in a few heartbeats
of a day.

She seeks the happy,
as she delves for the pride inside
of her and the precious life
that resides in the self.

All her shimmer
rides a rail of magic,
all her gold glitters
at the end of a lost rainbow.

Her beauty often touches
on another world,
where mysteries come alive
and mesmerize
only to slowly fade away.

She has made a home of me,
and I am grateful in that
choosing, for there is
no other place I wish
for her to be.

For she will forever in a day
be my Red Queen.

by Philip Wardlow Jan, 2020

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Outside the Something

Leave a comment

7.7 Billion
and counting
Of them all,
tell me,
am I Outside or
in?
Cuz, I feel like
something’s wrong
when the Outside
feels like my home
when the Something got their groups
cliques, committees, each
of them knowing the others
favorite songs.
Something to call theirs
and theirs alone.
Right or wrong
they got theirs
and theirs are,
mad strong
numbering in
the thousands, hundreds, tens
I’m not even looking for all
that
hell I’ll take just three
like minded souls
similar to me
I am betting nothing
can beat such intimacy
but I’m
Outside the Something
and it
feels fucking
lonely.

by Philip Wardlow 2019

Inquiring Minds

Changes and Letting go

Leave a comment

When younger, my life seemed in constant change and turmoil at times; parents fighting, my mom running. Always never knowing what was to come next around the corner. Where I might live. What school I might be attending. What friends I might have. What was right, what was wrong. My dad dying. My brothers fighting with me. Stealing from me.

Seeing my family change from happy to bitter and mean and depressed. Seeing them all slowly falling into this pit of darkness and destruction in their own personal lives by all their endless trippings of mistakes they were making and I could do nothing but watch them. I loved them all and I had no guidance myself for what it meant to be a man. My dad died when I was about twelve but my mom had separated and took us from him years before, but I held to him though. The memory of what I knew of my Dad. His caring eyes, his patience, his slow almost reluctance rise to anger. His calm knowledge and assurance of all things that he did teach me before he died.

I pulled him forward with me through time from my terrible junior high days of almost homelessness and trying to maintain decent grades at a school that expected your best at all times. I kept my head up and my smile even through my failings knowing my time would come and I would eventually win through.

I made friends… some good for me, some not so good but they all helped me learn who I was and who I wasn’t and who I wanted to aspire to be as a man all the while my father echoed in my mind.

Girls and Women showed me my failings growing up as the stupid teenager and man later in life that I was. I failed them all in certain ways which caused them to fail me. A collective comedy of errors on all our parts with no blame or disparages to throw.

I found we are all human. All failures big or small.

I have changed. I have grown. I have failed and will probably fail again. But I have learned, I am wiser, I stand taller. I do not look down or am ashamed. Because the past is not me. I am me right now.

Ever moving forward to bigger things.

by Philip Wardlow 2018

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

More than he knew ( for my Father)

2 Comments

 

I didn’t cry for you when  mom told me you had just died. I don’t cry in front of most people.  It’s too much to give them of me.

My two brothers had.

I remember my older brother wailing something awful, eyes full of anguish while my younger brother’s eyes filled over, tears  flowing down his cheeks like a runaway river in full flood.

Like you, I never showed anger nor did I ever show sadness.  But I remember your smile and your silence.  Such was I.

Three days later we drove the hour and half to your house in another town to collect your things and attend your funeral. You always felt a world away but you had always been close really.

There it sat,  your house, small, non-descript,  dull in color.

I recalled as we entered, me  visiting you once all by myself staying for a weekend.

I had baked you a nice big chocolate cake because mom used to bake for you and I knew you missed it and I wanted you to smile and be happy because I knew deep down you were not.

I wandered the house slowly taking you in.

In the bathroom your razor still sat at the edge of the sink just waiting for you to come back to pick it up and use it.

The chair you once sat in,  still with the noticeable impression from the gravity of your body filling it as  you watched television.

My brothers started fighting over something of yours they wanted to keep for themselves. My mom began to complain loudly about something frivolous like she so often did.

There I stood in the middle of the living room. Lost. Thinking of you.

A soft light spilled through the living room window to fall on the wooden floor  at my feet lighting upon the dust motes which filled the empty space.

I pictured you there. Like me. Lost . Forgotten while the world worked around you.

A deep welling up of painful pressure begin to rise in me, to think of you perhaps feeling you were not loved in your last years here on earth.

To think you perhaps felt alone in this world at the end of it all, your life coming to a close and no one there to send you off with a held hand, or a kiss or heartfelt word.

Then I silently begin to cry standing there.

I couldn’t have stopped if I had wanted to.

Then mom noticed and pulled me in close with a hug, my brothers turn to me and I didn’t care

For these tears were for you not me.

 

by Philip Wardlow 2017

 

 

 

 

 

Inquiring Minds

His Silence…

2 Comments

I often sit and just think about what formed “ME”

What led to “ME” .  How was I formed? Why do I function the way I do?

I like trying to understand myself as I am sure most people try to. I do it also to become a better writer. I believe if I can get to the root of me then I can get to the root of that character I am trying to develop.

I am big on being “real” with my characters. So many books I have read have stilted unrealistic dialogue action, and plotting just so they can get the character to the next page.

What’s my character?

I remember my father vaguely because he died when I was barely twelve.  The one thing that sticks out in my mind about him most was his quiet silence.

I call it a quiet silence because it wasn’t a disgruntled silence or silence that had a point to it. It just was.  There was no malice behind it..though perhaps there was a little sadness  at times in it.  To me it always seemed a calm acceptance  at the way things were or had to be.

There were one occasion where I really felt this silence within  him.

I was about nine years old and my mom had thrown one of her epic “tantrums”  I call them now. Plate throwing, iron skillet flying , cussing, and flinging of insults and  telling  of all the wrong doings done to her by him, my father.  And there my father stood in silence, one hand perhaps slightly raised in defense to any imminent flying object which may come his way.  The knot rising like a mountain  already on his head of one plate that had connected with his skull.

As my mom often so did when she would get this worked up she would flee. In that fleeing, she would collect up my two brothers and I in a whirlwind and drag us  from the house, our home, to stay at a friend’s house,  or a hotel far away for a short to extended stay of days or weeks or even months at a time.

My father would sit there in his silence and just let her take us knowing she would return sooner or later, until the next time of course.

But this time had been different.

As I was being tugged out the door by my mother (because I was always the pokey one)  my father suddenly reached out and grabbed my other hand and pulled me back.

So there I was, a human piece of rope being tugged by my parents. She pulled then he would pull back….

I remember my father distinctly looking into my scared tear filled face and asking quietly if I wanted to stay with him.

I found my mouth wouldn’t work. I couldn’t talk.. I could say neither “yes”  or “no”.

My mother overheard the question and then asked me in a clipped tone if I wanted to.

For some reason I found it in me to answer her…and simply said, “Yes.”

She abruptly  released me and left with my other two brothers. Gone.

For the next days or weeks, I really don’t remember, it was just him and I at home.  We hung  out , we talked in generalities and funny things that only a nine year old boy and a grown man could talk about.

I don’t remember the conversations or any of the activities we did. I do remember being content in that short amount of space and time with him.  I  saw his contentment as well.

I remember he seemed a little less silent when we were together during that period.  And even when he was silent he seemed to carry his silence a little differently when we were together.  Lighter , is the only word I can put to it.  I had come to realize he had needed me to stay….

I was happy I had said yes…

 

Silence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inquiring Minds

My brother – Past and Present reflections

Leave a comment

 

 

 

Another_Screaming_Face__by_Master_Chi

My Brother ~

 

His pain grabbed at me, reaching in to hold tight to my chest as he screamed in that moment to no one and everyone in the world. His scream filled me up with an overwhelming emptiness that I could never fully know as it found a small echo within my own soul.

His inner turmoil was plain to see, manifested in the violent visceral cast to his eyes and voice that seemed to travel somewhere else in that instance of time. I realized then that I would never find a way to calm his inner demons that had taken a hard hold of him.

 

 

by Philip Wardlow 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Assumptions of you….things you might not know.

7 Comments

YoungME17
Me at seventeen holding Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Forgive me,

for I did not know you as I had surmised;

silent, thoughtful,

and smiling in the corner

were merely a rippling

long flowed

downstream.

by Philip Wardlow

When I read any book by an author I like to read the Author’s note and  any forward they may have written. I personally like to get a sense of who this person is that wrote this book. What made them tick…so below are some of the things that might give you perspective into who I am and who I am not perhaps. I don’t know, I will let you be the judge. I for one hate self analysis because we lie to ourselves more than we lie to others. Perhaps you’ll see something in me that I don’t see myself…

**************************************************************************

My mother had me when she was 29….my father was 59 at the time…He died when I was 12…He was 72,  the age a grandfather should be.

Often my mother would leave our father at the drop of a hat..taking me & my brothers away…we lived in 18 different homes growing up.

Security seemed to be a liquid state to me as a young child…no solid friends..no real home to speak of…life always in transition.

My mother signed my older and younger brother  up in the Big Brother Volunteer program at the local college…me I did not get one. She believed I was the adjusted one and didn’t need it I guess.

My older brother William participated in sports and played a musical instrument at school.  I think I wanted to but was never asked by my mother, besides money was tight and he got first dibs.

I don’t really like my family.

I love them but I don’t LIKE any of them…in certain ways I am sure they don’t like me. I am not perfect. I have quirks and issues I am sure,  that annoy the hell out of them….your typical dysfunctional family.

I WANT to like them. But as I have gotten my life together in some semblance of normalcy they have still not to one degree or another.  So I AVOID them if I can because its a DRAG.

Am I selfish?  Should I feel guilty? At times I do.  At others, NOT in the slightest…Blood is NOT thicker than water at times.   AT TIMES you need to live for your self and be selfish….I had to learn that was okay.

*****************************************************************************************************************

I am forty-three…

I hate my age…

And not for the reason you think. I hate it because I really  started going after what I really wanted in my late -30s…which is as you can see is Writing…

I try not dwell on the almost 20yrs of wasted time  of not pursuing it….”OH the things I could have written in that time” flow through my head at the oddest and most inconvenient moments.

But I shut that  annoying voice out and carry on.

Also at forty-three I wish to stay in shape ..so I work out on a constant basis. I have a  sucky metabolism so I must.

I work out to look & feel good for myself,  my wife and any lady passerby on the street who wants to check me out…:)

I didn’t always think I was a handsome person. I kind of had an ugly duckling syndrome. I grew up with a gap in my teeth and because we couldn’t afford  to pay for an orthodontist, so the gap stayed . We also were a poor family that didn’t have the ” cool” clothes or stuff so I was pretty much ignored by other kids at a certain age.

I still have the gap but wear better clothes.  My wife and others have convinced me that I don’t look hideous. I will take their word for it.

Seriously though my confidence has grown over the years with that. (still have trouble with big smiles in pictures..so I look mean or stoic or something half the time in them)

I always like a compliment….who doesn’t.  So go ahead tell me I’m cute I can take it…:)

I think I will wrap it up here for now….perhaps I will share more of myself in later posts….now you know just a little more about me. I am going to go relax and read a good book now.

Picture 024