Thin winter, this year of death -
funerals abundant as wild ivy
clawing up suburban walls.
A starving need is growing
like algae in my belly.
I seek proof from death columns
in the Classifieds, like dope
to dull a nagging sense
that we were singled out -
stoned on knowledge
that we all go the same way.
People die.
I threw up before I left the house.

Black ink of another eulogy
bubbles acid in my gut.
Red wine in a highball at ten-am
has become my means to settle
trembling hands and voice.
Below its scarlet veil, the ache persists.
Since his suicide, people
have dropped like Chernobyl flies.
Processing relatives, life is a high
speed liquidizer blowing blades of reason.

Scribbled words on scrap paper
substitute worry beads.
Absently, my fingers roll them
into a cigarette.
I would give a toe to smoke them.
Pieces of me want to explode
with laughter, to drown the quiet
with a spray of raucous hysteria.
Silence is a lawnmower trimming sanity.
Middle-aged women in outdated hats
greet me. Surely they are not as old
as they look.

I seek solace in the gardens
of remembrance.
Six months since summer
pretended to be autumn, since
soft rain fell out of heaven
while we interned his ashes.
More gravel than ash - like discarded
fragments of shell.
Like many things, they are different
than I had imagined.

In all this unnamed grass
where do I find him?
Eight footsteps from the bench
twelve from the oak.
With downcast eyes, I watch
ants move house.
My mother says she can feel
the peace, says she senses
the presence of rest.
I sense neither.
I am bitter and cannot disguise it.
The sky doesn't care, it's blue
and water sun pisses down
through translucence.

Inside the cold tomb of worship
to a god with whom I argue
I receive silent nods from faces
whose names I cannot recall.
Cloth of invisible blood stains
shrouds a small coffin.
Robes a mile long walk the plank
to alters of incense and small
bells on ribbon echo into stone.

I imagine Sunday sermons
to educate the masses
'before it's too late' emphasised
with water, a hundred burning candles
and young boys wearing dresses.

I wonder if the priest remembers
when we blasted these leaded lights
with 'Every Breath You Take'
while shell-shocked mourners
poured from church doors
after the funeral; or how we sang
'Imagine' and -everybody hurts...
sometimes- chipped voices
trailing to a twelve string guitar.

He signals me to the pulpit.
I unroll my cigarette eulogy, clear
the sawdust from my throat:
'a precious lady left this world
during the small hours...'
Cold sun burns a hole through stained
glass windows and maybe normal
is about finding an audience
just as desperate.

Give me one and I promise to perform.

I never really knew what it felt like to be her -
it's taken so long to know how it feels to be me.
When the past is left alone for long enough,
it consumes every tissue.
Like a filter, it strains sections of the present,
producing a percolated experience.
Raw present is elusive, protected by gauze
dressing of the past, it is rarely visible.

In memory she is taller, her face more gentle,
covered by a soft down film.
Then, her long, long room was always cold -
a chamber of relics; a library of coloured fabric;
odd buttons; and forgotten calendars on the wall.
Like a chandelier, magic dangled off high
pressed-steal ceilings, and behind her mirror
shadow people came and went at will.

'Rain makes rain; sleep makes sleep; and money,
honey, well... money makes money,' she once
told me, her false teeth clicking together and living
a separate life from her lips.
When she slept in her chair, top teeth reclined
on her bottom lip, which lifted at intervals,
allowing shots of air to flop out her mouth.
I would stare, 'how peculiar,' I thought, trying
to visualise my own face in slumber.

She never spoke to me by name.
'You're different,' she would say. 'Not like them,'
grey eyebrows smiling upside down.
'They aren't the same as us. We know things,
you and I. I can tell you anything
because you will remember it all one day.
Perhaps you'll write about me when I am gone.'

It was then that the sun came out on her face,
the way it did the night before she died.

We were big, clear balls of glass magnifying time.

i.

Fingers shackled with platinum
like toe-tags for identification.
Before spousal bondage, grass
beneath bare feet grew green
and lush, upside down clouds
were near enough to touch
and moon shone soft as flowers.

Life endures, joy begins again.

If only to wear a loud hailer.
If only to trace a map of the scars.

ii.

Drop the veil. Slip off the garter.
Walls of Jericho crumble to the sound
of fractured church bells, swollen belly
bearing young and being flung
down flights of stairs.

"These things are natural teething problems"
fickle women disguise warts with pearls
of black wisdom.

Blood in my mouth is the soil of new ground.
Dragged six feet under on the wings of love.
Rotting at the core, I am a brown box
stamped fragile, left in the rain.

iii.

I'll never tell, never let the words spill
from the hole in my soul again.
I lie.
Because I am wasting.
A leaking faucet staining the sink.
Touch is a splintered plank
whipping my ears into submission - listen! -
while you cavort with verbal excrement, paint
bedroom walls with its rancid aroma, roll
it into sushi and serve it on fine bone china.

iv.

Girl in a closet hung on a rail, dry-cleaned and ironed
to wear on the arm for special occasions.
Hermit crab; snail fried in garlic - cracks in my shell
start to show.

Anger is not a word anymore.
Pain is a sentence.
Forgiveness is a dictionary explanations do not fit.
You are a socialite and serious about it.
I am a pale-faced poet flying naked in fallen sky.

Give me a name.
Make me somebody.

Invisibility is the jagged edge upon which you slit my wrists.