The Departed

There are locations of treasured thought
Mostly in the outer regions of childhood memory
Where the fields are carpeted with an eternal dawn’s frost
A frost that sometimes, when a remembered song, or smell
Finds me, sparkles and dances with light.
Often when sleep won’t come, when car lights wash across
My dim lit room, I hear the sound of drunken laughter
And irregular grunts rise through the floorboards
Overwhelming me like the surrounding darkness,
A darkness I would finger, searching for reasons
As to why I had been discarded during their hours of joy.

When they died I was watching soft porn,
I recall answering the phone sweaty and stiff
Head bowing as the news came through
Watching my member droop, feeling everything fall away
I searched for their faces, the familiar lines of their wrinkles
The grey flecks upon her cotton blonde hair,
Yet only a rainbow of colour and blackness formed.

When you and I first met, I mocked your ability to see
Those no longer of flesh, how humorous your yelps
When the dead surfaced on the steamed windows
Of the laundrette, or the misty figures swirling inside
The smashed up call box.

The night they first appeared, you brought me into
The pillow of your breasts, accepting my words as
Though your own. My tears worming their way to
Your belly button, as though conscious of its origin.

it’s often the corridor they dwell, lined like silver drapes
I do not fear them; they are petals quivering in fields
Of splintered light, I accept them as though words
To my favourite novel.
And now when sleep acts like a stubborn child
Bare footed I linger in the hallway watching them
Watch over me, as they did some thirty years before