In Search of Tabloid Headlines
Will your ambition deface
our past and see our lives distilled
and paraded naked in this impersonal place?
More than my affection will be killed
by such crude self-serving usury.
Seduced by mythic income
you gamble recklessly
chasing prizes to out-strip everyone,
abandoning the old pretence that Love is Art.
How can I condone this calumny
and betrayal, your decision to depart
driven by cheap fame and weak posterity?
You hope judgement will be fair,
that legend - not notoriety - will be your heir.
Pilgrimage
We set off before first light
the pre-dawn drive straining the eye.
Numbed by pulsing headlights, my sight
tried to race ahead, to preview the majesty
of the village beneath the hill,
a return to a bygone age
where all we imagined remained there still.
It was a pilgrimage
even if we struggled in the car
and travelling wasted too much of the day.
"That’s just the way things are"
you said. We were about halfway
stopping for lunch at noon
already resigned to our returning far too soon.
In the Hospice
Head bowed I withdraw, sadly
drained of the remnants of joy
harvested from recalling days gladly
spent with you. Now the smallest thing annoys;
the slightest sound
- each a rude assault upon your ear -
does nothing but confound.
Confused past patience, how can you bear
the discordant clatter of another
cup and saucer, the pleas of those ordering
capsules of relief? I remember a mother
and the way she would spontaneously sing,
happiest then with an audience of one
now only content with an audience of none.
In Mourning
There used to be a sparkle in your eye
fired by a vigorous joust with life.
And then I watched it die,
an unwilling witness as you lost your wife,
you so desperate to weep
inexplicably dry-eyed at being left behind.
She would have told you what to do: keep
looking to the future, your mind
alive, remorselessly focussed on how to spend
your time - and not waste it
as she feared she had in the end.
You say I cannot understand it,
how heavily it sits,
not death itself but the emptiness it commits.
On Being Asked To Prove Love
This fog, dense as any
in living memory, spawns improvident
thoughts. How many
others are left searching for the once self-evident?
Opaque enough to disguise hate
this ghostly world conspires
to heighten the primacy of fate
and sharpens my desire
to understand the workings of a mind
occluded by the harsher metrics of love.
Do I force you to be unkind
and demand newly conjured metaphors to prove
all those things you mean to me?
If so, should I exclude all those no longer there to see?