Eighteenth Day Elegy

Life is a sequence of blinks,
it flashes in and out continually.
Until it doesn't anymore.

Moments, connected like dots
in yesterday's sky
have gathered into clotted clouds.

Gaunt winter of sunless nights,
of rain and fallen cutlery, of life
inside a vacuum of death.

Points in time nailed to a cross
where he is remembered
to have been smiling goodbye,

to have left footprints,
like negatives behind closed eyes,
to have betrayed

the tell-tale voice,
where he is placed high
and worshipped

while we try to make sense
of this.  We dissect
question-marks like insects.

Eighteen is a day
where reason is found
in the grass on its head

and we are the dead:
the living, crawling
in and out of understanding

like worms in sand
of no second-chances.  We are thin
shadows kneeling in prayer,

our lives attracting dust
like stamp collections.
And words mean less now,

just froth on a sea of sadness.
His memory, the water
in which we dissolve like tablets,

in which we pretend
grief is not what suppurates
from every wrinkled breath.

“Time.  Give it time,” people say.
Such ignorance stains us
quiet and bitter.

Time is all we have
and they know nothing of it.
It eats away at who we were;

erases permanence
like candles melt into their wax;
reasons that a revolution

around some distant sun
is enough to mend; says a year
has gone - and we believe it.

Time is a crumpled shirt.
Caffeine, the means to starve
sorrow's scarlet flower.

Life is lost and we are stoned
on suicide.
Woollen eyes weep

in tongues: cry, cry
to some magnificent god
we cannot see or touch.


Eighteenth Day Elegy first appeared in Unlikely Stories in 2003