everwalker

I miss you when you’re not with me It’s the obvious time to miss you My busy life keeps cantering on Filled with friends and frivolity But if you walk in unexpectedly The sun and its summer comes too I miss you when you’re standing here I know you will not stay And I must let you go with a smile Because to cling is to lose you The thought of which hollows my heart And is your absence in proximity I miss you when I’m in your arms You are not mine to hold tight For as long as I hunger to do So I leave first, I always leave first, You pulling back from me is worse, And as I go I miss you

I used to dream of a normal life: An office job from nine ‘til five, A loving husband, two point four Children, one dog and maybe more. The thought of kids went down the drain At fifteen, with illness and lots of pain; The doctor, looking sad and stern, Said “You can’t carry a babe to term.” The working hours idea got bent At twenty one, when I needed rent Money, took the first job I found, And damn near worked the clock-face round. (And once you’re in, like a lobster trap, It’s hard to change your career track.) I thought, at uni, I’d found the man I’d spend my life with. That was the plan.

I’m fine. I have spoken with friends on politics, hobbies, arranged to see them in a week’s time. I have walked streets that know me, caught snow on my lashes, as the first flowers thrust green spear-tips into Winter’s belly. I have listened to music, both new and beloved, and bought songs that sang in my ears after ending. I have buried my fingers in warm fur, received in return a rough-tongued kiss and a motorbike purr. Whilst I do these things, I’m fine. I have not opened my lips and broken my heart on the bone-white rocks of undesired declarations. I have not boarded a train, a plane, run from the pain to the fa

Did you think it had gone? That scream inside you Which shimmers and grows like a bubble of glass, As fragile and sharp-edged, just biding its time, Cutting deep after it should have dissolved. No matter how long and no matter how large, You still can’t work out how to exorcise it. You wait, and you hope, and forget that it’s there. And sometimes it stops you breathing.

Stuff words into a cupboard’s cobwebbed spine, Place useful pots in front and close the door. The constellations never see that thought, However much they blaze and tempt and whine. The tearing rocks lurk under mill-still streams - Keep them submerged and slip smooth past the shore. You don’t know what could be lost overboard By jibing into star-crossed rapid dreams. So push the words back to the shadowed deep, Stop up your ears with glass that cannot gleam. Those sirens taint whomever sees them weep; Above all things you love, this must stay clean.

Under the veil of winter weeping, Bones of trees in shrouded white, I wander alone, my footsteps light. Frost in my breath and in my heartbeat; Casting no shadow, stirring no stone, Waiting for Imbolc on my own. Wake in the green when the leaves unfurl, Fire returning to earth. When you rise I will be waiting, Waiting for Spring and your birth. Under darkness, curled and cradled; Dreaming of war, of blood on the blade. Death cannot dim the blazing Warrior forged in bronze and sunlight, Heart as boundless as the sea. Dream now of me beside you, where I have always been. Wake in the green when the leaves unfurl, Fire returning to earth

White is the colour of my sorrow Your skin without blood A deep dusting of winter The air I speak is empty And white is the colour of my sorrow

you have no care for my world racing to smash it to bloody fragments and leave me bereft in its ruined wake in the grief of your heart you forgot the guilt of mine and roar blinkered through the darkness in a black coffin that - remember! - has two seats

My hand is a stranger's hand Reaching with its own desire For objects I do not understand My tongue is a stranger's tongue Tripping over words I did not think Spilling secrets without permission My heart is a stranger's heart Trapped within a cage of ribs Craving visions I cannot imagine My eyes are a stranger's eyes Windows set some distance back Through which I watch a foreign world And a stranger's heart wants the passing colours And a stranger's tongue gives glib replies And a stranger's hand clings tight

While you still lived I wrote your elegies, Such heartfelt songs of love and loneliness Mourned in advance, a shadow that I hoped Would never fall, would never come to pass. A child’s fear, exploring boundaries Of my worst nightmare, hoping that control Might come from better understanding them, And praying that I’d never feel this way In truth, that I would be the first to go. You died before me. How can I write your elegy now? No music comes from an empty echo. No beauty from half a pattern. My arms embraced your last breath And it took my world with its passing. --- The sea is fed afresh by silver springs. The white tree s