"HELLO MR. DEATH AND HOW ARE YOU?"
by @donall-dempsey
"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.