Page Twenty
tues 24 june 2008 Greenfield
It’s now noontime. It’s exactly 16 weeks ago this moment that the sheriff’s deputy came and tore apart me and my family, and destroyed my life.
And… I came to this community, namely, franklin county in Massachusetts, in August 1985. By August 1995, I knew that if I stayed in this community, it would kill me. And it has. I was right. Not hubris, just a fact.
And that’s all I can do on Thread One today; nothing on Thread Three; but on with Two:
Number 20 (Aram’s poem)
Someone more: Oh, brother – where are you now? Are you together, (Abel is in front, you and he, Aram in the back)
blond brothers from the blond mother
we lost?
Do you breathe together somewhere?
Were you killed side-by-side,
blood brothers to the last?
Always shy, frightened with anyone but me. So many terrors of the outside world. So much like me, you are, or were. Are you past or present now, my face-kissing, word-squeaking, love-loving brother, my boy? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Number 21
Seven weeks ago today they came: the sloppy, the loony, the uniformed, the cruel. Came to drag us from our place, came to shame and hurt us, to tear us apart. No one came who loves us – there is no such one. No one came to take us off, safe, to tell us not to be afraid, to tell us this wasn’t the end of us.Only the vicious, the vacuous came. Came only to hurt us, to shame. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ See Aram again here. ~~ See the website.
So… however many people this destruction of my family has involved (a landlady, a tenant, the DMH and CSS, and whoever else they might have had to help them) it has been wrongly and cruelly done.
Update 17 August 2009: What else can I say? During the 17 months I was having so much trouble with the drug-dealing tenant, I called every agency for the disabled, for women, for low-income people that I could find to try to get some help, even before I ever applied to the DMH. No one would help end the harassment from this other tenant, which went way beyond any behavior I had ever experienced from any tenant in over 20 years. The DMH didn’t help, and they didn’t help me find a home where I could keep at least a part of my family.
