Slow Death Rehearses

Most people who leave comments on my blog don't know me at all. This is, of course, entirely my fault, as I never tell them anything about me. And part of me likes to keep it that way, a space in which to be whatever I want without expectation, without consistency (which I've never had). I am really enjoying hearing all the comments from such a rich array of people, who are all so talented and so unknown to me. I also really enjoying writing poetry, and find things are coming to me all the time when i sit down with a space to write in. So to let you in a bit, (if i can flatter myself enough to believe that you may read this), I am going away, moving to a different part of the country, and the poem I have written for this week's poetry Thursday sums up why I need to make this move so badly. As I wrote it I realised how I felt more deeply, and that to me is the beauty of writing my own poems. I am healed by them, made aware by them, cry by them and laugh at myself because of them.

Did I bury you?
Like a bone, savoured for another time.
Shove you under a rug somewhere, a toy,
hide you under the pot outside the front door, my key,
forgetting the dark hole it covered up.

In my sleeping wakefulness you remain
a young girl in a dream.
In those times alive, leading me out to fields a-green,
Only then to die, disappear in a flash,
and the green fades to grey, dull ocean of existence.

Yet still I hold on to you,
my instinct tells me you're alive,
and sometimes I pick up your scent on the breeze.
Which promises faithfully to reunite us one day,
An incoming ship on silent, murky seas.

Because without this hope there is no sense.
Without that brief light there is simply nothing.
My shadow sits here alone, behind a shapeless fence.
Wasting, suffocating, emaciating.

Could it not be that I could come to you
to seek my treasure so lost?
Break free from this apathy, entropy, the cost
of belief in a life without me?

Because life must seek life, is that not true, is that not real,
given only the tiny of chances to do so.
Is that not a fair gamble to take,
When slow death smiling rehearses?

Now You Remain

Precious one, at first you were still here,
even though you had gone.
You held my heart in a vice then,
becoming tighter and tighter,
until I couldn't breathe,
suffocating under the weight of your memory.
Every object you had touched tortured me,
every space you had occupied became a prison for my soul,
and I had to clear you from me,
remove the remains of our death,
scatter stale ashes.

And once gone, newness came,
a new dawn with new light.
And grateful for its promise,
I drank it in deeply, becoming drunk, giddy.
Unknowing of the faceless friend behind my new guest,
who was empty, longing, broken.

His gift was the memory
of us,
as we had been before.
Embarrassed and shy, legs dangling before clear water,
warm sun shining down upon us.
He recited the conversation my soul had taken in deeply,
that first day, which had nourished me,
and given me life,
changed my world,
healed a wound dark and void.

He kissed me with your lips, held me with your hand.
Sang your heart's song to me, slowly, succinctly.
And my heart held you close,
found only the purest space in your soul to sink into,
and weep by.
A smiling soul not gone, but here still.
A soul which had remained by my side,
shared a life lost with me.
An honest soul which played only ever a true hand,
Earnest, eager, moved.

And so taken from me,
now you remain in that space, forever.
Eternally by my side,
in the memory of your face, your touch, your kind words
and your kind soul.
Now you remain, forever.

Sleepless Room

In my dark, sleepless room, strong light has begun to flow
through a narrow channel, which has begun to breathe life again,
slowly, in my surrender.
The words of the Spanish song were lost outside of me
in that former place, and space,
but now they flow freely through me,
carried on the tide of a warm light,
the rhythm of a drum beat gently knocking at the door of my stony heart,
where a child sat hidden in a grey room.
I can hear that it's started to rain,
soft shimmering waves against the window.

The ceiling I stare at is no longer artexed but frescoed,
as my imagination's own designs begin to uncover themselves.
Like sand shifting,
time moving, revealing bit by bit a pattern engrained in a sacred space,
lost to a world and rediscovered in my universe.
I can see her now, strongly outlined, centred in this pulsating wonder,
Gloriously attuned to her surrounding home.
Woman-child, now alive,
her face aglow as she conceives a new vista before her.
And through a beaded door she reaches through to meet his hand,
Which has become strongly outlined besides her own.