Memoirs of a Life Unlived

It’s absurd to imagine That my death, all this mess, will one day be Commemoration, a tidy object. Yes, I know that’s life and memory But this – my death, my end of everything – Subsumed into fact like concrete hardening So that in a year, ten years, one hundred, This strange tree, my shallow breathing Will be writing on granite, and silences. The sun’s rising and soon those clouds Will meet it. It will be sunny somewhere And cloudy in other places. 11 th November 2018

But I’m trying not to let you go Further into wilderness. Signs and tarmac yield to unmade roads, Paring down to tracks, gates, fields And beyond, where trees peter out, Those featureless moors You walked as a youth From tor to tor, head down on the upslope, Lost in the joy of emptiness, That brain you hate running clear. I’ll keep fewer tabs on you now Because you’re not yourself and so You won’t miss what you don’t know. Cowardly and distracted I'll never appreciate The absence of difficulty. Do you know but can't express That all this is because of me? What a thing to hold on to When you're unravelling!

in memoriam John Edward Cole Ninety one; if it were candles We couldn't picture them, Your cake would last for weeks. You moved through days racked up as history: Huge wars, new bombs and ways to talk - Nerves and confusion tainting the map. You made ninety but there wasn't cake. Late seventies you thought you were - Not stolen but rearranged. Brothers and sisters back from the dead. When mum walked out it broke my heart; She was scattered in the garden all along. My expectations were spinning plates. Each conversation was a slightly different man, Baking cakes in my head until the news came.