If Only You Had Caught it on Camera

It's 8am in the middle of summer, I'm never awake this morning. I had a dream I was watching my parents first meet on camera, needless to say I woke up with tears and could not calm my restless mind.

The tapes would be rolling

Rolling back with her eyes as the kids watched 29 years in the past

When mother strong beautiful and all caught up on rays of the sun

First saw him

She tells me

 

Your father was the dorky kind

Tall he had barely grown into his six feet and two inches when we met

He had blond hair that sort of kinked and curled around his ears

With the most metal in his mouth I had ever seen

It was like he had an entire mine encasing his smile

With a nose crooked and bent off to the side

 

He had hungry blue eyes

Those blue eyes are something I will never forget from that time

The way they look just like yours

There are things I never told you Tori

She would say to me

As we would sit together with my heart churning deep in my baby blues

Waiting for story’s from a time when

I was in no one’s eyes

 

We had a song

She’d say

Careful not to tell me which song it was or why it had been that song

Just

They had a song

 

It’d leave me to waste hours trying to figure out which silly 80’s love song

Must have belonged to my parents

She’d look at me like I tossed the stars out of the sky with his features carved in hers

She’d say when we first met

He was so charming and handsome I couldn’t help but fall in love fast

 

It was a young stupid thing

Married at 18

Moved out a month later

Couple years out of high school

And your brother was born

 

But then I would whisper under my breath

“How can 22 years of marriage be a stupid thing?”

I don’t think about it much now

Or even really at all

But one day they loved it each other

Something like the soul mate pair of two geese

I know it was like that looking at pictures

Always with the dorky smile on his goofy face and my mom

Oh my mom with her 80’s dew and intentional gaudy clothing

With cheesy rock and roll carved into the veins of their small town existence.

You’d think they were soul mates

 

When you look back at old photographs that give you just a tiny snap of what may have been

But oh god how I wish

They had a video camera from that time

To catch those ghostly laughs of the past that is written on the faces of the entire dead and dear family

Something light hearted to match the anger

That boils and curdles in my blood from waking up 27 years or so after those sunlight spackled moments took place.

I sometimes wonder what happened

But then I remember

I’m old enough to know exactly what happened

 

My father

The person I looked up to with big blue eyes that matched his

In my 14 year old frame

To watch as my family crumbled around me

Knew what had happened

 

He Lost His Will

For a family

So my mom packed up her things

And she left

 

She’d be back for me

I swore it until she did come back

Swept me off to be with her and her new boyfriend

 

But I wish I had seen them before all that

I wish I had seen them with stupid things like throwing rocks off of cliffs

Was etched into their existence like by a saw

If Only You had Caught Them on Camera

Author's Note

everything here is intentional

Reviews

[benjammingham]

I've always been amazed by poems that don't rhyme. Some people can't pull them off, and others weave the words into beauty.
You weaved.
I'm not normally a guy who cries, but if I did, I would at this poem.
You said that everything here is intentional. I'm sorry.
I can imagine that this must've been extremely hard to write, and yet you were still able to write this.
I like how you used the word 'spackled' to describe the sun...unique...
I also like how you ended with the title. I do that a lot too...
This whole poem is a story really. I like that it was arranged by each personal thought...