Blurring

8:03 AM, I was called at work and told

my uncle was 48 hours from being unplugged.

I didn’t know how bad he’d gotten;

I don’t know if I cared enough to find out.

In my teenage years, I found a way

to be kind to him; mostly, he seemed

less the enemy than other family.

He punched me once. I couldn’t have been

more than three feet tall, and he was on

his second day of binge drinking.

It hurt; I’m sure he felt it upon sobering.

Even recalling the way he knocked the air

clean from my lungs, meanness

was not something I saw in his eyes.

He was a forgotten man, due to mostly

his own mistakes; perhaps the drunken spells

were the only way he could manage the blur—

less burdensome than focusing.

Just like everyone else, by my twenties

I had forgotten him as he sat idle

in a nursing home only able to grunt

and motion with clumsy hands. He’d done it

to himself with years of addiction; a stroke

left him dependent on people more than liquor.

I told myself time and time again

that I’d visit him; I failed. Years of regret

and lacking are what remains. Guilt craves a blur;

in my own, I cannot focus on his faults.