Mirage

Ghosts too can go on loving the living without them ever returning the favour. I have devoured my skeleton for a delusion. Come and find me when my silliness has devoured itself and I have started again. Who would have thought silliness could be so serious eating its way up through me with its games. Roll marbles over my emotions. Sparkling stars fuse out the quickest. Now I have only to grow flowers in the wilderness. I’m swimming to the bottom of the ocean so I can breathe again. Time tiptoes around every minute squealing what wasn’t. Daftness slapped in the face and seeing what I want is always somewhere else and not a place I can move too. Say hello to who I was yesterday if you ever see him again. The landscape out here is cold but the screams of my stomach keep me singing under the facade of my smiling face. Coming home to who I really am and the finally death knells of wishful thinking, well maybe.

The Graveyard in the Sun

26-06-11


I went on that day to find someone like you amongst all the other so-called sleeping prisoners. Cast in the sunshine I went wandering as some kind of exile in the horizon of the dead, this is the only place where the land is laid out to stretch, where there is some pretence of. Why are care and the community more thorough once you’re under ground? Headless angels and forgotten names are landscaping my day out for you if they are still there, you are not here you are somewhere else but I feel like visiting your compatriots is the best I can do today. This is the only part of the city where life and death are allowed to meet up in plain view.


Frank, Hannah and William go by and a cider bottle or a bottle of some fermented juice to drink away loss, and there I was I found me. It is somewhat odd to come across a gravestone with your own name on it. A married dead version of me it would seem. Frank and Hannah and William are odd company but not as odd as the headstone that has nothing on it, imagine being dead and anonymous. Is that a failure of a death? I count the ages walking by and play the sick game of finding the youngest death; I think I found an infant of several weeks. I then wander all the away across the graveyard looking for the opposite, it doesn’t ring out in your eyes as much to see ordinary sized deaths, the later the graves the later they die and later and later. What time is it?

The uneven graves hide under the wonderful day. So untidy up close, like the flawed contours and cracks are hidden by a conspiratorial sky and ‘our loved ones’ can keep up not having their flaws noticed. Going by me are a middle-aged couple, or a couple of people, a husband and wife, a brother and sister, two friends? Dead people have a habit of bringing people together, even if it’s the ritualistic and necessary cleaning people come here to do.

The Children of Grief

To go by your side and walk hand in hand, it’s how the love I have for you arose so strongly the moment you were no longer around. For you to take me away again in your car and spoil me on Sunday: We go on grieving and my grief plays games with the image of your face comes out of the abyss and says ‘hello’ and parts and leaves again. You make these strange little visits; hushed, quiet and brief, playing your love across my face and making me cry out in the wilderness where we used to go for coffee.

Upon your shoulders I used to ride high amidst our holiday destination, piggyback me back to anywhere so I am back here with you again. Temporality switched off with your death, my body shrank in the wash and I was five again. Then came being eighty-five and feeling the wars on my body and then back to age five with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I pang with each piggyback ride through my memory but I see them more clearly now and with them you: the grief didn’t go away it went away and came back better, I no longer mind swallowing the meal of your memory everyday and every week and with it the twinge.

Their not you, they: But I’ve found a few now whom I can call home and who know me like you. I spent two years out of orbit, insane on the bliss of grief; that blue opaque sky is now the mapping ground of my life with you or your life with me. I think I can just about fit everything about you up there; spinning cobwebs of images and thoughts and snatches of voice your still quite alive up there, in the sky and in my head. The café did a dance without you and asked why you were missing, I had no answer but my stares at the empty chair where you used to me, the table and the coffee doing a negation through the air, pleading for clemency against reality. I know this is going to hurt but don’t hurt to bad; bring the crying after the coffee somewhere else where jurisdiction of pain in public does not reside. We bleed far more easily than we cry; no one ever felt the impulse to inhibit a cut. I sometimes feel like I pull blood back up into me for the sake of someone else’s embarrassment. After somewhere else is how I deal with you; lodged in the calendar like an exploding piece of time. They, them and it all surround me pointing the finger to suggest you’re not here but I no longer fall into the invisible trap where you are, I have what you were and the why and how to get me dancing around your absence and the game of hide and seek with your alluring shock to the system go on but I know they are all part of the exploding bliss of life.