A quarter century ago
I came to this world
Crying and kicking
Maybe it was wisdom
Mistaken
Maybe it was warning
Unheeded
That with every anniversary
The World will love you
A little less
That with every year gone
Life will slip away
A little more
But still, it is a milestone
And I mark mine
With my words.
It’s like going back in time
To the places you’ve been before
But this time they are bereft of people
Empty of action
Silent in words
And there I see the ghosts of our past
Walking down the cobbled alleys
I see them smiling, fighting, eating, drinking
Just walking….walking
It’s a yellow town
And a white lie
It’s a rocky coast
And a sea with salt from my eyes
It was the shortest of lives
And the deepest of all
****
To this place I will return
Without choice or effort
It’s here that I saw beyond myself
And fell into the abyss that you seem now
I might have clambered up the slippery walls
Into what the world believes is real. Practical.
But.
My soul wanders the yellow town
Alone in the past.
While the world assumes its focal point to be someplace,
The real events unfurl elsewhere
In the peripheries of eyes, just round the corners
Pitched battles over pitchfork issues
Come to a close when the Sun’s gone behind the lantana bushes
To scorch ground and sinews on the otherside of an ending.
We think it’s over, when it hasn’t even begun;
We think we are dead, when we haven’t even been concieved;
We fear we are losing, when they haven’t even begun taunting;
We decide we are the ones moving, when the Earth turns one last time.
I have your number and a phone without numbers to dial
I have your picture and an empty album
I have your voice and ears without their facility
I have your clothes and a body that fails to hold them
I have your breath and some skin that lies dead
I have your flowers and some stalks with prickly thorns
I have some tears and eyeballs that have dried up
I have more of my love and no more of your demands
I have myself and the knowing that you aren’t mine anymore
Why can’t I decide I’ve seen enough
Of life, never mind I’m just a laughable 23?
What ought to be looked forward to, but
The gradual happening of life…the movie
You wished would end, the pages you wished would
Run out?
The sadism behind every living moment
When I submit to its whims: cry when Life deems fit
And laugh in between for comic relief;
Bear children who are unlikely to see me as anything
But their Indian brown version of the ‘White man’s burden’;
Share “moments” with another, who is set for
An all too similar fate.
And if Death were to favour him over me,
For all my desperate longing
What should I do? Or rather, what can I do?
I’d join the billions, wandering through
An accumulated loneliness,
That was once fervently hoped
To be never gathered.
But like dust, it has gathered over my memories
I would think after all those years
When I try to count using my fingers
The way I must have
Once upon a time.
I walk on feet that don’t
Stop for me to hear
Your words
I see with eyes that fail
To grasp the glimpse within
Your folds
I watch mindless figures
Walking and talking lines
We should have shared
And your faint overtures fill
The peripheries of my eyes and
The insides of my eardrums
I look down at the milling crowd
I see you, that tiny black dot
Standing six feet above ground
Yet, several feet below me.
As you will always be.
