The past does not return, nor do past loves.
They languish, slump, fall into ruts:
we try to recreate that first-time wow
but bypass that love, end up fisticuffs.
And so a river passes under our pain:
what part of us can bear to love again?
Much easier to blame, provoke insane.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
the pert petalled chrysanthemums
lean over their vase:
a tight little offering
from someone who can’t be arsed
to think of the meaning
of supermarket flowers:
chrysanths can mean death –
theirs as well as ours
If I look at my work through my father’s old lens,
I can only see fatal flaws.
If I look at my work, check down and not up,
I’m only fit for a crippling critique.
If I view my work through his envious look,
I can sense his blue eyes go glazed:
his look can melt my cast-iron talent
to a wobbly, kiln-broken mess.
But the lens through which he has cast his spell
has been buried five years and ten.
At what point can I say ‘enough’ to his hold,
and deny his dream-hogging blitz?
My real dad’s been dead a decade and a half.
But the inner one just can’t let go.
OK, so I’m loyal to my daddy by birth.
But there’s a time and a place for loyalty and guilt.
Instead of looking down my father’s old lens,
perhaps it’s time to write my own script.
Loss speeds alone; angry car drive
unpleasant. Duck, dive, dodge;
sneaky sideways swerve
leaves the South London visitor
outmanoeuvred. In the funeral lodge,
wishing she’d ever had the nerve
to address the issues she’s never dared.
Long-gone relatives leave memories dislodged.
Maybe black and bruised was all she deserved.
My love in life was seeing the world.
To be precise, it was sunning my soul.
I came alive on my summer holiday:
my skin could cope with all those rays.
My problem was, I couldn’t see beyond
those speckles of sun. I was just too fond
of easy-bronzed skin to see that my girls
were curled to wizened, before-their-time whirls.
A strip of hurt they might just tolerate
but, in later years, they felt victims of Fate.
It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t really know
that love and abuse could be bedfellows.
I thank the wisdom of my first-girl is called
to cancel the bits that left her appalled.
She learnt from me how to be what I’m not:
she’s now reaching out to heal what I hurt.
Ten years of non-life,
as dementia kicked in
were still the breathing years.
I’ve got maybe 40 years left
to live or non-live,
depending on what I fear.
What I can’t get over
is the flick of the fatal switch
from here to not-here.
I know all about the shock that comes
with that sense of leaden dread:
it’s all over now.
We’re talking definitive adieu:
no more chances for ciao.
I know all about the stages of grief,
but knowing won’t numb my pain.
Shock, anger and denial,
depression and then acceptance?
Yeah. But MY loss can’t be so contained.
Some tears are too big to be held
by a flimsy little tissue.
A dabbing of nose and a clearing of eye?
Sometimes there’s a bigger issue.
Some tears need an absorbent snort:
something to hold, not judge you.
The mists o’er the Loch
are breaths, they say:
breaths o’ the lost,
prolonging their stay.
The blue mist seeps
into grateful bones.
Within these deeps
I’m never alone.
I’ve always wondered what was hiding in Good
about a Friday that foretells a death,
where a revered man is nailed to a cross
with the scent of vinegar on his breath.
Dying he destroys our sins
is the story I’ve been told.
But what the story means to me
is a transforming that will unfold.
I had to explain, one random year
To an au pair of Easter knew nought.
So I explained that trust and hope and faith
can get lost in the cycles we’re caught.
We’re meant to believe that all will be right,
when cometh that sacred relief,
But when agony pricks the white of my eyes
I’m tumbling into my own grief.
Metaphor’s the cross, I know all of that
because problems resolve in their time.
Let it go, they say. Let fate do its work,
let your bum note again find its rhyme.
inktuition 