Clearing ivy,
pulling up handfuls of
choking bindweed,
uncovering delicate
wildflowers in
neglected garden corners,
and there’s this
tiny bird
lying in the dirt.
Feathers sparkle
pretty and golden,
as fairytale light
falls through
parted vines.
Surely dead,
but then
- like Snow White
surfacing from
magic apple-induced
dormancy -
the bird moves,
woken by the kiss
of sunlight and
being witnessed,
and seems to breathe.
A gloved finger’s
exploratory, leathery ****,
a moment to realise,
then disgust,
sharp recoil.
A wing lifts;
gleaming feathers
parting reveal the
crawling mechanics inside,
the writhing, parasitic mess
behind the sick illusion,
the briefly faked miracle
of something
like life.

Away over a fence,
Union bunting
***** erratic and jarring
in a neighbour’s garden.
In a stuffy town hall,
the town band is practising
God Save The Queen, but
still can’t keep time.
Our betters wave to us from
high palace balconies
and golden coaches, and we
cheer them for it.

There’s such hunger, such
pain and desperation out there,
you can feel it, if you
forget to stop yourself.
There’s so much tragedy and injustice,
you have to go numb or go crazy.
There’s no future we can see,
and the past has been rewritten
to reflect the views
of focus groups,
fascists and fantasists.

And there’s a bird
lying in the dirt,
garlanded by fragrant petals,
feathers flashing like jewels,
so dead
it looks like
it’s breathing.

It's genetics, 
and it's 
environment.
It's meningitis, glandular fever
and the novel coronavirus.
It's bad habits catching up 
with me. 
It's poison dust and GM foods
and leaded petrol. 
It's stress-induced.
It's karmic irony.
It's my sense of foreshortened future 
made manifest.
It's a new way of self-harming 
on a cellular level. 
It's punishment from a god
I don't believe in.
It's the universe replying it 
doesn't care.
It's
dumb
*******
luck.

There's a million different 
(equally plausible, equally irrelevant) 
reasons.
None of them change anything.

To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends,
to every emptiness we cannot fill:
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

Everybody knows, yet each pretends
that one can shape the world around one’s will.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends,

A wall imprisons all that it defends.
I’ll watch you from my tower on the hill.
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

We all know what the prophecy portends:
a crow, a wedding ring, a poison pill.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends.

The breathing labours, and the heart descends;
a final rattle before all is still.
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

You must accept, though no one comprehends,
the knowledge all great tragedies instil.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends:
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

After their separation, she used to joke
that they’d get back together when
- and only when - one of them
was on their deathbed.  Well, it
wasn’t quite a prophecy, but it did land
painfully close.

Almost fifteen years since they’d last met,
he caught a plane, got picked up from the airport by
a stepson, long estranged, who
brought him to the hospice.
Seeing her there, in a terminal tangle of tubes
pumping drugs into her veins and
oxygen into her riddled lungs, he said:
“But she looks exactly the same,” and
if that isn’t code for, “Yes, I’m
still in love with her,” then
I don’t know
what is.

The next day, he bought her flowers,
fretting over floral symbolism
and how his bouquet could be interpreted.
Their daughter advised,
“Just pick something pretty,” so he chose
pink roses, stargazer lilies.  Of course
she loved them.  They were
from him.  
“Do you remember,” she asked him, as leaves
fell from tall trees outside the window,
“when we were the beautiful people?”

The flowers outlived her,
if you
really want to
talk about
symbolism.

My brother came up to collect our mother’s ashes.
At the same time, he dropped off her old vacuum cleaner.
I don’t know why exactly.
I hadn’t asked for it and didn’t need it;
I guess it would have been a waste to just get rid of it.
The thing is, 
it hadn’t been emptied, 
and for some reason that 
broke me 
all over again.

That grimy little time capsule.
That cyclone technology urn.
Contents:
Dust of a home you can never go back to;
Fur of a cat now settled with a new owner;
Dead cells of a dead woman.

Remains.

Lately, it feels like there are
a lot of ghosts that travel with me,
everywhere I go.  
Some of them walk on two legs, and
some on four;
some walk leant on sticks or frames,
and some don’t walk at all, but
roll slowly and inexplicably along in wheelchairs
with no one pushing.
Sometimes they follow behind me;
sometimes they’re all around,
thronged so thick and close that the
pale, sad smoke of them
starts to sort of obscure the living;
sometimes, it seems, it’s me
trailing along after them.
And I don’t know what it is
that we want from each other,
and I don’t know if this arrangement
is healthy or proper for
any of us.
But I love them, 
so we keep on haunting one another. 
I love them
too much
to ask them to leave me be.

It’s been three weeks, and
I’ve ******* more about
the agony of losing you
than you ever did
about the agony
of actually
dying.

On a scale of one to ten,
how much does it hurt?

Guess you had the higher pain threshold, after all.
Then again, you had better drugs, too.