INVISIBLE BLUE PLAQUES

Someone or other
lived & died here.

Some other someone
wrote their most

famous work
there.

Every so often
a blue plaque informs us

as we journey
through town

(rain falling down)    

of Blah Blah
who blah’d & blah’d here

or was
blah’d there

... who cares?

In my mind
I ***** invisible
blue plaques

to commemorate
us.

Here: we kissed
(did we not?)    
...a mere minute ago.

Here: we turned
& laughed

on the corner of this everyday
road.

Here: we laughed
& hugged

on a pedestrian crossing

(a pedestrian
crossing)    

whistling at our
ardour

a taxi honking
at our armour.

All over London
our invisible
blue plaques

commemorate
us

&
that

we once
passed this way

so deeply
in love.

"HELLO MR. DEATH AND HOW ARE YOU?"



I felt like a fog
in the shape of a man
a dream walking



a shadow
come alive
never more



alive now
I was
dying



this moment
the most precious thing
I had ever owned



unable
to believe
I was leaving



the sunlight of this
morning behind
me forever






time lay scattered
on the ground
my reflection trapped




in broken bits of mirror
strange that I
would never be




me
ever
again




a cuckoo
( the clock )
not( the bird )



had the last word
I had to
smile...




*



Felt good to cheat my own heart attack..you kinda attack it back with nothing but words and the need to capture it and make it talk.But it's impossible to grasp and poem after poem tries to hold it only for to flow like water between your fingers....like trying to grab hold of a piece of sky and wrestle it to the ground.
Alas my little brother didn't manage to cheat his and the words keep trying to explain this unexplainable fact to my self. I look at the typewriter and it looks back at me...both of us at a loss for words.



"Бог правду видит, да не скоро скажет", as they say in Russian.
Spring had arrived in that Dublin morning...just snuk in when we weren't looking. We were having breakfast and after we would cycle to Eccles Street to see a real house that was lived in by a fictional character. The house was a mere ruin and would soon be knocked down to make way for a new hospital wing.



Time, as it happens, stops when one is dying or rather that particular moment lengthens forever and a second is a century. Mr. L. Bloom's house was in my mind and my hat would later blow off into its basement and I would be as one with the man himself as I lowered myself down to retrieve it...thus entering a chapter in Ulysses. And the fiction was made real.



I had just read Huxley's TIME MUST HAVE A STOP and afterwards thought how ha ha...apt!


I had also come across a 1664 phrase about  buds that "explain into leaves"  which I thought delightful.


I had also came upon a battered copy of Bacon's SYLVA SYLVARUM (  A natural history, in ten centuries. Whereunto is newly added the History natural and experimental of life and death, or of the prolongation of life) which alas would go inexplicably missing and which I would never read to this day.
These are the things that were running through my head when I was going to be dead but...just as suddenly wasn't.


Oh and Tolstoy's GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS was ratting about in my mind somewhere so it was going to be a very literary( literally )death!


Each Spring I go back and revisit my death( that wasn't )feeling glad to be just....alive and...in the moment.

SCHRöDINGER'S SOCKS & THE REVENGE OF THE CAT

Schrödinger's cat
failed to see just what

all the fuss was
about?

It was all such
a reductive absurdum.

The cat couldn't understand
collapsing wave functions

decoherence
entanglement or whether

reality was really
quantum

to save its life.

It was aware of
one thing & one thing

only
. . .the diabolic device. . .

Cat in a metal box
with a Geiger counter

with a radioactive substance
blah blah de ****** blah

an atom decaying or something or
other &

releasing a hammer to smash
a phial of hydrocyanic acid.

Wot!

"I do not like thee Dr. Fell!"
thought the cat.

It was a very literary cat.

So all this palaver
about a cat( me? how! )

being both dead or alive or
neither dead or alive or

. . .wot!

So this is to be my great
to-be-or-not-to-be!

Welllll excuse me!
Say...doesn't the cat have his say?

So, I( clever cat that I am)
merely claw my way to the top &

disengage the device
by taking out the hammer.

So no cat was harmed
in the making of this

thought experiment.

It almost drove Schrödinger
out of his tiny little mind!

And he( hee hee )
never did discover

what ever
happened to his socks.

I forever stealing
one sock from a pair

from the open
washing machine.

Leaving him to ponder
just where socks go?

The other side of the Universe?
Oh come on Erwin...it's not

rocket science!

Now, to get back to
describing the behaviour of

a quantum entity.

"Mmmmm......mmmmmm?"

"Naw....I still don't get it!"

"Say ya couldn't see yer way
to giving me a scratch...could ya?"

"Up a bit....upabit....yeah...yeah
. . .there...just...there!"

THE PAST PERSISTS

Dizzy with love
we fall out of the sky

and now the ground
cradling us in its palm

the giddy fun fair
exploding all about us

kisses sticky
as candy floss

we dive into mirrors
changing shape changing shape

our hearts
a helter skelter

strange to have
a body again

even if only
in imagination

us old ghosts
haunting the memories of us

that refuses
to go away

this moment
the Mount Rushmore

of that summer
we were

alive so
alive &

the car crash had yet
. . .to happen.

*

My friend and his wife spent a day at a funfair and went on all the rides...they laughed all the way from swing boats to ghost trains. The day was as sweet and sticky as candy floss. On the way home they crashed and although he barely survived...his wife was killed instantly. He was very guilty for having survived and blamed himself and conflated both events in his mind and his mind kept coming back and going over the events in minute detail. Past and Present were collapsed into the one time of No-time and he was like a living ghost coming back and haunting himself.
He died alas....from his injuries but as I sat with him he kept conflating the events from the fair and the happening of the crash together so that everything happened at the one and the same time.
That's why I thought of them as ghosts revisiting their last moments.
Like the two personages in...Eyes Do More Than See by Isaac Asimov.

CHOCOLATE AND REMEMBRANCE

I killed men
because I wanted to

come back to you
so that I could be

your husband
still..

My enemy too
had someone who

he wanted to
come back to.

I took his life
so that I could go on

with mine.

I had survived
the War

because I wanted to
and because of luck.

Good luck or bad luck
it's hard to tell now.

I see my wife
and see not her

but a woman strewn
like so much *******

in a French village
we slogged through.

She was naked
and had no eyes

where her smile
should be

nothing but
an empty hole.

I go to hold
my little girl

can only see
a girl of three

still burning still
her doll untouched.

An old man
not a man

just a piece of man
a head...a trouser leg.

I killed so that
I could still be me.

But I'm not.

I can never be
me again.

There is an audible line
drawn in the sky

between me
and the me-I-used-to-be.

The war rages on
inside me

and all the dead
come up to me

begging for chocolate
and remembrance

chocolate
and vengeance.

THE LAST ONE TO KNOW

He smiles
in the mirror.

His reflection
does not smile back.

He raises his left hand.
His reflection does not.

He raises his right hand
and scratches his nose.

His reflection does not.

His reflections laughs.

He does not.

"I'm afraid you're dead!
his reflection tells him."

"Only you....
...don't know it yet!"

His reflection steps out of
the mirror

no longer made of glass
free to be whoever he wants to be

instead of being chained
to this human.

The reflection leaves.
Slams the door.

The body on the floor
does not even hear him

. . .go. . .

MISS PRUFROCK REGRETS

in the loo
the women come and go
talking of Michael & "Oh...Angelo!"

knickers down around
her ankles
she pees& weeps...weeps&pees

her running mascara
turning her into
a giant panda

she tries to put
her smile back on
the Shady Lady lipstick breaks

her mouth
a jagged ****
making her a scary clown

she locks her self
in her golden compact
it snaps at her fingers as it shuts

"Oh fu..fu...fu..!"
she bites her bottom lip
endeavouring not to( "Feckit!" )swear

the loo door opens
she can hear THE MERE MAIDS
singing...singing

"Come with me my love
to the sea
the sea of love..."

the loo door closes
THE MERE MAIDS fade
"oh oh oh...oh. . . OH!"

her friends come to
powder their noses
***** about her

she stops peeing
in mid-flow
a solitary tear trickles over her nose

their vicious laughter
stabs at her heart
their cruelly coloured chatter

"And her dress that
trails along the floor..."
And this...&...so much more

"And ah ha ha when
she spilled the yogurt over her
shirt...skirt!"

"It looked like someone
had ohhhhhhh
come all over her!"

"I know...I know
I almost wet
myself!"

"How her hair is
growing thin"
a squeal of high pitch giggles

"And her arms and legs as well!"
these her friends
putting the knife in

"She's such a bore!"
her best friend chimes in
"Et tu Bunty?"

they leave en masse
the many headed
beast

THE MERE MAIDS
are murdering
Kylie's CAN'T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD

I have measured out
my life in facebook friends
do I dare...delete them?

And do I dare...
go back in...greet them
false face to false faces

in the lamplight
her upper lip downed with
light brown hair

I am..yes...I am
that cockroach
scuttling across these toilet tiles

she pulls her knickers up
the elastic snaps
they fall to the floor

she steps out of them
sniffles...sniffs
tries to maintain a stiff upper lip

"Let us go then you & I..."
she tells her reflection
her reflection doesn't budge

"Just...what is it...about me!"
overwhelmed by her own
question

she prepares her face
the mirror
sniggers

she parts her hair behind
puts it up in bunches
smile...scowls

I know...I know...I am
almost at times ridiculous
almost at times...the Fool

she goes back into
the solitary confinement of
the toilet cubicle

smokes her last
crushed cigarette
flushes the **** down the loo

"Toilets is an anagram for T.S. Eliot!"
the scrawled graffiti informs her
she doesn't get it

lapses back into
her native lingo
"J'en ai marre d'en avoir marre!"

the Disco ball
tears the shadows and the souls
out of the dancers

THE MERE MAIDS are singing
'I'M TOO **** FOR MY CAT!"
her ****** friends sway together as one

Mademoiselle Prunella Prufrock
has left
the building

in the loo
the women come & go
talking of Michael & of "Oh...that Angelo!"

*

A friend's story telling me about the first time she had been out after losing a baby and singing THE SEA OF LOVE at a karoke. We both loved Prufrock and so her favourite poem and her favourite song were going to be the world she was put into!