Only healing

I lift the bonnet of my memory on you:
The voice on the phone telling me the terrible news of your death.
The Autumn leaves turn away from green
Hardly believing the deepening sense of loss
Of your sparkled energy of life
That was a sign of hope;
The hope is different now - I struggle with this - 
Turning away into something -
Not sure what yet. I have not found my footing.
There is no cure for it,
Only healing.

---

The inevitability of the thing

The anticipation is like the bark which is way worse

Than the actual arrival of the thing – the bite, I suppose.

I lie awake all night thinking

Of the morning cold, the dark sun, the coalface:

The absence of birdsong and the full throated cry of the alarm clock

Intrudes into the dreamless sleep.

A scratch and the yawn and then the arrival

Which is covered in the inevitability of the thing.

Walk through

I want the time before now and the end to be done properly

And, if a I am lucky, joyfully.

The stuff we deal with has to be walked through and not around.

It is painful, and not to be taken lightly.

Walk through – a slight shuffle or a stagger through

– maybe a wobble through –

But a get-through

To the end, properly.

I have arrived at this place

I have arrived at this place – don’t ask –
It’s not quite what I expected. It has no shape or colour -
but it is a place, at least.

It has space and time
Not quite like a Little House on the Prairie kind of place.
Not a Hotel Budapest either.

(Odd examples, really)

Neither, if any, that can be pinned down.
Not a movie kind of place.

This much I know,
the throbbing has gone.
I am in this place with space 
between the lines that
are both said and unsaid.