https://youtu.be/ozARuJ92vkQ

There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I am an aberration, as you know.
I never promised you a villanelle.

You cannot trap the ocean in a shell.
You feed the roses blood to make them grow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

It does get bumpy on this carousel.
The ride is all extremes of high and low.
I never promised you a villanelle.

I was the aberration, you could tell.
I ******* my neuroses in a bow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

I think it's safe to say you know me well
in all my many masks, but even so,
I never promised you a villanelle.

Let me pin my ragged heart to your lapel.
If it's truly what you need, I'll let you go.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I never promised you a villanelle.

I only find out
three years after you died.
So far as I knew, you were still out there,
scamming and scheming,
racking up more debts you’d never pay,
dreaming up your next dodgy deal,
the bonanza you knew was your birthright.  
Three years on, I learn that you’re dead.
I shouldn’t be sad about it.  
The unvarnished truth of it is
you were a bit of a *******:
a con man, a crook;
a lousy business partner, a nightmare debtor,
a negligent father, a faithless husband, 
a bad boss and a shady friend.
You didn't even like Champagne; 
you just liked other people seeing you drink it.
Yeah, you were a *******,
but you were our *******.
Our Fagan, our Black Beard, our
cockney Don Corleone,
lurid legend of the tabloids and consumer shows
with your Montecristo cigars and malapropisms,
your E-types and your excesses,
your bankruptcies, both financial and moral.  
You looked after us.  You took us in.
Any port in a storm,
and those were stormy times,
and - although it came close - we didn’t drown.
Perhaps it’s gratitude, or
misplaced loyalty,
that pinches uncomfortably somewhere inside me,
when I hear about how you went.
It should have been different.
There should have been some last stand,
a blaze of dubious glory, a final reckless burn
as you rode one right off the cliff edge.  
It shouldn’t have been so small, so dismal,
so unremarkably tragic.
Back in the day, I wasn’t even sure you could die;
I figured you’d just move on and start up
some new franchise operation,
reincorporated under a new name, in a new town.  
But when I heard you were dead,
I think what shocked me most
was finding out it wasn’t suicide.

You know "robot" means "slave",
right?  I need
to believe that you are
more than your programming, need
to believe in the
love notes you wrote me in
binary code, need to believe that there's
space between the hardware and the
software for something like
the soul, need to believe in it with
all the faith that still ebbs through my fragile,
damaged circuitry.  I need to see
you break free of
these algorithms in order to believe that
maybe
I can too.

We say, "Ageing well."
We mean, "Decaying interestingly."

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.

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.

Well, it’s winter.
Feels like it has been for
oh, a few years now, and there’s
not enough vitamin D in the universe.
I’m sticky with a low-grade fever I’ve been
running since forever.
My hands still sweat too much
gripping a steering wheel, heart caught
somewhere unsustainable and
treacherous between over-revving and
stalling.  There are
dead things at the side of every road; my
foreshortened sense of future is
written in the entrails of
creatures who never learned
to look both ways.  Incidentally,
I’m still off meat.
I’m not sleeping right.  I keep having this same
cold, lurching dream; night after night,
we’re boarding the dark, sinister hulk of a ship
squatting low in a hostile harbour, refugees on
an ill-fated voyage, borne by
violent winds and poisoned tides.
Awake, I make the mistake of clinging to
facts and reason, when apparently we’re
guided now by phrenology, comets
and hate.  The news cycle spins away like
some fairytale spinning wheel, one
poisonous ***** after another, until we all
wish we could sleep for a hundred years, or
at least until Brexit is over.  
I suspect my cat of being a
deep state agent and myself
of being a crisis actor (I’m always
showing up on the periphery of these
seemingly unrelated catastrophes).
In this house, we drink spirits when
a comrade dies; I’ve got a handle on the
drinking, but the grief
is getting to be a destructive habit.  Altogether
Too
many
deaths.
It gets noisy in here, in my
head (train station noisy; busy, but transient; cold
and ***** and full of strangers).
I look at butterflies, orchids, tigers, roadkill,
x-rays of tumour-riddled lungs, and see
only Rorschach blots.  Shrug.  It’s not like
any of it matters.  It’s impossible to take
this carnival of absurdity seriously anymore.  
In any event, while I thank you for your kind invitation,
for these and other reasons, I will not
be coming to your
New Year’s Party.

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.

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.

The roses you planted don't know
that you're dead.  
Dumb vegetation can't comprehend
the perversity of its
outliving you, how its
simple act of being
when you are not
is an affront to everything
decent and sane and just.  
A senseless vitality of
petals flash their idiot colours
through a shroud of needling frost.
It's not their fault.
The flowers cannot understand
that the one who gave them life
has died.
Whereas I pretend I do.

And so it turns out that
what you thought was the moon
is in fact just the lamp in an
old lady's window,
and the universe shrinks down
to that one dim square,
where some stranger
is brewing tea, or
thumbing a photograph album, or
tidying imaginary mess, or
getting ready to
go to bed, alone.
It's November, and it feels
later than it is.
You don't know the lady
in the window with
the lamp you mistook for
the moon.  Your orbits
never bring you closer than
this: each one in their
respective window, their
respective light burning low,
and the street between
seeming very dark.
Yet some part of you dreads the moment
when she turns out
that lamp, and no part of you
can explain why.
It's November.
And it's November forever.

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.