Andrea Gibson - Sleeping lyrics

When the flowers were stolen
From my uncle’s grave
My grandmother drove to our house
And collapsed at our door
Strangled as an empty Christmas stocking
Wailing for her piece of coal
I have never seen a person
So finished with God
Her face was a massacre of grief Her cries
Like shoveled granite chewed through
Her shrilling throat
All they left was the flag
She kept screaming
I thought her lungs would start bleeding

It scraped my chest clean
Hollowed me for weeks
Our house was the echo of a mother
Clawing the floorboards for her dead son
A downed forest in her nail-beds

At night I obsessed over how long flowers
Might survive in the hands of thieves
Spent a month scouring for
Answers in our basement
In the photographs of my father in Vietnam
He was as thin as a blade
His eyes unfiltered as the cancer
They were given for free
Anyone could see, but the
Freckles in his shame
That war was no place for a soldier

The heart is no place for the
Talons of the kind of secrets
You can only keep in the same
Chamber you will keep loaded
To keep your hands from shaking the
Ghosts of dead children awake
My uncle wasn’t killed by a bullet
He drank himself to sleep trying to
Drown out their tiny screams
My grandmother followed him to the
Grave like every mother does

I keep thinking of them today
As I sit in my parent’s living room
My father has been home from
The hospital for a week
But, I was just told he spent 3
Years in a field of Agent Orange
But is refusing to accept his
10% veteran’s medical discount because
A true patriot knows cost of war
Pays for it himself

I have written this poem before
But always through a window
Never through an open door
I find my mother by the stove
Stirring spaghetti sauce from a jar
I have never heard her
Breathing pull this hard

Earlier, in the car
While my father broke down she turned up the
Radio dial to save him the
Embarrassment of his whimper
The radio was playing "I Wanna Sex You Up"
We listened to it at full
Volume for three minutes
It was fucking hilarious
How none of us heard the word

I don’t hear the words anymore
The president announces the end of a war
And I just stare at my mother’s eyes
As my father’s face falls into
The trembling trench of his hands
Like a boy fresh out of bootcamp
Who has just dropped his
Gun into somebody’s cradle when a war ends
What does that look like exactly?

Do the cells and bodies
Stop detonating themselves?
Does the orphanage stop screaming
For it's mother? When the sand in the desert
Is melted down to glass
And our reflection is not something we
Can stand to look at does a white flag make
For a perfect blindfold?

Yesterday I heard a story about a
6 year old girl in Iraq
Who can’t sleep because
When she does she dreams of nothing but
The day she watched her dog
Eat her neighbor’s corpse
If you told her the war was over
Do you think she’d sleep?
She’s seen teeth rip through a
Ribcage and swallow a heart
And I can buy dog tags at the mall
I can buy camouflage at the Gap
I can stare at the Vietnam Wall and forget
It is missing the 2 million names
Of the 2 million Vietnamese slain
So I can certainly forget about the
Little girl, her dog, the neighbor
And whichever soldiers we choke-chained
In the opposite direction of God

At 4 AM I find my father in the living room
The news caster says that the number of
US soldiers killed in war this
Month was outdone by the number
That came home and committed suicide

Outside, there is a flag waving
From our front door
My father picked it out as carefully
As he picked out my name
When he built our house
I want to tell him that
I still build my spine
From the clothesline that holds
His work shirts but, I know I’d start crying
I am exactly like him
We both have wrinkles around our eyes
A hundred years older than our age
We both carry ourselves like ambulances
With someone dead inside
Hoping we’ll get there in time
I didn’t get here in time

This house echoes like an empty canteen
Flowers don’t survive long in
The hands of thieves so much is wilting

I look out the window
My father’s flag is a glow in the moonlight
I remember something I was
Told many years ago:

I was told in World War I I
80% of us soldiers could not
Bring themselves to kill
An enemy soldier they found sleeping
Sleeping

I want to ask my father if
He thinks that is true
But I know he won’t sleep if I do
And he needs to sleep god knows, we all do