“When you know my name / and all of my hideous mistakes.” *
Some apologies have an elegance.
This is not one of them.
There is no begging for forgiveness ,
Only that you – as witness to my prayers of apology- can somehow forgive me.
Again.
*Julien Baker – Rejoice
For the one I hardly knew. For you, B
The weight against
my left arm;
the calm;
deliquesce into dreams,
& all other words that can never reach
across the distance between us:
return,
return to me,
don’t
leave, don’t
leave
only empties,
& drained memories
of masochistic anarchy,
& romantic naivety;
the weight no longer against my left arm:
how can I dream of anything without
your human heat beside me,
the scent and sense of you that lingered
for days; the way
each morning I would be made to
force myself to leave
from beneath
the bed sheets & between
transcendent moments of butterfly wing
flickering eyelids unfurling
into the purity of attention
beyond
the iris reflection?
You saw me & didn’t look away:
I thought I saw you until the day you
finally found tranquillity, that day
I remember so vividly, the day
I realised I was blind:
only saw what I wanted to, never
gave the true love you were long overdue.
With your name tattooed into my skin; with
these still-born memories knowing I will never hold you
again
I continue
for every me & every you, for
that short time when nothing else existed
but us.
Summer:
a late evening sky as you wait
for something, for nothing;
you understand what that
“certain slant of sunlight” truely is &
know you won’t ever need to explain why
all art is a beautful lie
containing multitudes of meaning…yet
even as the years grow unheeded
still you can’t decide between believing
“Une vie pourrie vaut mieux qu’une putain d’illusion”
or if beatiful lies are sometimes truths
in disguise…
but for now there is only the fading
colours of the sun &
in this moment, that is enough.
I tried smiling at your funeral,
to avoid the choking weeds of grief.
Breathing trees
no longer naked,
their limbs veiling then revealing
a diamond-clear sky,
stood beside the road leading
to the building where your family was mourning.
(When she asked me where you’d gone,
I told your daughter you had
become one with nature;
every flower,
the lambent limbs of sunlight
& all those dignified trees,
believing
you would like that answer.
I hope I wasn’t wrong.)
A vodka (double vodka) before
the eulogy,
& another
(& another) after
it was over.
Then, outside: cold bright sunlight,
dreaming of you dancing;
the prosody of your body,
singing,
as roses red & white
flowed from your hips,
replacing the weeds &
loosening their grip,
just long enough to bring
some small relief
from the reality of your absence.
Yet there was nothing except
the brutal eloquence
of silence.
& the memories surfaced like
smoke from a furnace;
up from the chest & through the throat
to find a home behind the eyes..
When our hands have searched & found
the feelings we wish to drown;
when our dreams creep & crawl along the night
into the darkest corners where
creatures hide;
when
the words become sounds unbound
from meaning only vague feelings
& images remain,
What happens then?
Words for Ghosts 