I wrote this long ago for a friend with cancer - a small malignancy the size of a pearl in her lung. The hateful thing metastasised to her pancreas after two years in the shadows - she lost her battle last week. She was 73. She was firm friends with my mother my entire life, and her own children Isobel and Craig are like my own flesh and blood. I was unable to attend the funeral due to ill health, but she requested this poem be read out at her funeral - I'm sharing it here as a tribute to her, and I've changed names to preserve her privacy and dignity. **


This kingdom's hewn of time and words
And glances flashing over
Shadows, shapes and silhouettes
And pearls of smoke and ochre.

Rude invaders! Generals!
Who dares encroach our borders?
"Naught but pearls my princess, so
We strike! At dawn! No quarter!".

Set shoulders low and feet aplant
And curl your fingers slowly.
Your enemy is swift and lean,
Ten thousand times below you.

No mercy from a princess who
Instilled in fresh disciples
Wisdom, courage, whimsy, love and
When it's called for... rifles.

Gather muskets! Catapults!
Oh marshalls! Summon nurses!
The game's afoot and outcomes?
Well, who dwells on whom we versus?

For masses swell behind you and your
Gleaming armour guides us.
Swords aflame! We saw! We came!
Wakes of pearls behind us!

Ten years hence, one hundred, more
Louises, Davids, Andrews,
Will sing with you your victory,
Sandy Alexandrou.

The man sings like a plague
crawling on the ground,
its attachments are not the first
thing you’ll notice, but when
his verses and the tone of his voice
slowly takes over the machinery

of your Monday morning misanthropy
you’ll begin to wonder
how you could ever forget
that loving takes more from you
than you could ever give, and how
you do it anyway. The toxin

now in your lungs, and your body’s
immune system is hostage to his
rhythms; chasms of his songwriting
has metastasised into your liver:
I love you’s taste like anxiety induced
speechlessness, and bile, and how

many times will you run this over
in your mind like a hallucination.
His song like a plague,
has wiped out this population
of sorrows, and what now of you
who has only ever claimed

that sadness was your art, your clothes,
your home, your sanity.

*What now?