Move On, Grandpa – Michael Roque

November 20, 2025

Gone, but still you cry.
A projection of heaven—
or mere memory?

Materializing piece by manic piece within a nightmare bloomed from a dream. Reclined before a blacked-out box TV in a dimmed-out, colorless 1990s. You— gifting me the purple skies, the tears leaking from the eyes of your peaked elderly self, indefinitely molded to the home we no longer visit.
In sleep, the living speak and scream, while you mouth for help in a dream I’m destined to wake from. Flesh can’t assist spirit in our predicament. Two beings— one owned by world, the other by realm, separated by physical sensations, beating hearts, blood flow and quantum echoes, spiritual residue, and a bent tombstone.

Cry toward the light.
Snip your extension to life—
it’s temporary.

 
Provincial Girl

 
A provincial girl,
her state is vegetative
as the moors she walks.

Voices beg. Plead! Don’t wade into that bog. You. Will. Sink. But she walks in again and again. Born, dead, reborn and dead again. Ears firmly closed to the echoes, the calls for reason spanning months… years, while she’s on a treadmill running herself exhausted toward an ideal, till again, her scotch-taped heart crumbles into shards, smashed and shattered. Now her heart is broken open to what really matters.

A provincial girl,
like cities never sleeping,
her state is awake