My mother asked for help
in her hangover of anesthetic stupor.

It was more of a begging, really,
a language of some hallucinatory volumes
book-ended in the pull of confused napping,
just bobbing up from the deep
and immediately afterward sinking
to wherever she would float for a time, just under
some rough tossed waters short of sense.

She always took days to come fully up
from the shallows, and now, laden
with half sentences anchored back in dreams
cut short, I couldn’t tell you what
she wanted or needed. Only that

wherever and whatever was happening
in her truth of delusional moments,
she required me, recognized or not
as her son, to assist in some way
that I failed to comprehend.

And I was as helpless there as she.