PART 2

I have an experience within me

As of great stones being moved into place,

To have known that much of infinity

Though everything else has failed, is to face

All that I cannot understand and yet

What are these stones when the only answer

Is the Giant’s Causeway tumbling down. Let

The dark sea’s utmost currents close over

Me if I should have harmed any of my

Children but you placed a millstone around

My neck from the moment they were born, why,

Because I brought them forth and through them found

Myself and then from your weight was set free

To stand before the old man of the sea.

For years I walked shallows clear with you while

Your weight bore me downwards, from the first time

I read of you to my last stumbling mile,

Your silence always a prophetic mime

Of all the blame you laid on me and my

Endless unforgivable fault, children

That grew alongside of you. Must I try

That long road and the unforgotten sun-

Bright torture, all the grey vanished trawling

Moons of almost thirty years, to know how

To begin even as great stones moving

Unbroken sea historical and now,

Releasing rhythm an awakened dream

And below the surface of things that seem.

And worse than death is the living death of

Life itself, that zero hour when the end

Masquerades as its own shadow and love

Is an echo of loss without amend.

What am I left but that open endless

Shifting road to return to and beyond

Which there is nothing, an imprinted stress

Swathing through shallow sand yet abandoned

As its memory behind me.  I turn

Around only to face my own folly,

A woman in love destined to return,

To bear again the old man of the sea

Alone through hell beyond hope or despair,

Left to walk in the stoop of the sea there.

Where are the words that could describe this place

Where I exist and breathe and yet descend

In slow free-fall over the world, its trace

Below is but the outline at the end

Of everything I have known and of all

That I have been, only its memory

Can tell me who I am, its diurnal

Arena as I fall from the sky. We

Are the surface shadow moving with bowed

Heads against a wall, before an April

Wind heightened with swollen rain and a crowd

Of voices clamouring the night until

Their echo dies away, impossible

Distance buoys me upward to where I fall.

Words crowd upon me, where do I begin

To sort out their meaning after sixteen

Years and at the same time face my ruin,

And a past that drags me backwards between

The flight path of one and the hurrying

Lasting footfall of another.  I run

The space that holds them together and cling

To the shadows that keep them apart, when

All the while my life is nothing more than

A chalk cliff crumbling downwards and sudden

Into the sea.  The scattered words are an

Ever shifting reach of sand both open

And ochre, blown elemental below

To shore inextinguishable yellow.

I felt that I had been cut free and no

Longer had an anchorage in this world

Where the sound of a leftover echo

Was the rim of sand at the sea’s edge hurled

Into emptiness and then thrown again

Back upon the shore, shifting endlessly

Between contour lines and uncharted grain

Against grain from surface depths of the sea.

And there I stood as a shadow turning

Into light, rooted in the undertow

Of the earth yet borne along sand moving,

Levelling and deliberate below,

Through the haze of distance and horizon

The sun’s dark span was a mirror broken.

May and June disappear, blurred to a dark

Brief unending green seen through the last low

Rectangle of a windowpane, the mark

Of a mind’s echo with nothing to show.

There is nothing leftover from its long

Labour through history and no answer

From the silence for its supplicant song,

My emptiness flows over the paper,

My life goes before me and I exist

Only as memory pulling me down,

Just to breathe and yet to dream in the list

Of perpetual water where I drown.

There is no poetry at this extreme,

Silence is the shadow of things that seem.

I encountered you first on the night road

With my mother and there you were silent

And subtle and following in the mode

Of shadows fast around us as you leant

Towards her veering back from wind and rain,

As though you were alive and hurrying

To keep up with us to the end.  In vain

I tried to leave you behind, burying

You in the shallow depths of memory,

Even as I walked that familiar

Route you quietly deliberately

Waited until my fear was on a par

With you, then at the far edge of distant

Time you drew near sure and precipitant.

My throat tightens with its own airlessness

When I try to remember those first days

And the long drawn ricochet of distress

That echoes always through a darkened maze,

Enclosing urban light and starless streets  

And the far-flung random of sodium                

Glare, night shadows where fugitive sound meets,

Reverberating in a vacuum               

Then and now. The search is impossible,

Endless circles that open and widen

Close in an origin beyond recall,

And a language heard and unforgotten

Where broken spoken words that will not mend

Urge me on a journey right to the end.

What was I writing all those years ago,

When I awoke something had been cancelled,

A sense of something more than I could know

And yet nearer even than time once held   

Or memory left behind in a dream,

Left for me to find but without knowing

Where to turn and lost in the space between. 

What I have known is an endless reaching    

After, trying to fix the fugitive       

To a page, an unrealised future

To a dream and a last struggle to live,

I cannot make anything work, the lure

Of fear that effaces as an echo,

The silence leftover in its shadow.

I cannot make anything work any

More and the clamouring minutes arraign,

Leaving me no rest from their jeopardy   

And yet pushed to the limits to explain

How the familiar has worn away

And how everything I have known holds  

No longer than an ordinary day.    

My silence grows as the low flame unrolls

Fanning an inferno from a despair,

An existence even to the last word

And a vigil before the empty air,

Searching for meaning alone and unheard,

Or a reason left for being alive

In order that a poem might survive.

Leftover from my past I watch July

Burn to an aftermath of paper-thin

Enervate leaves turning full or awry

On restless dry stems, where do I begin

To look, waiting near a window always

And existing from minute to minute

Hour by hour, the days lost in their own haze

And night, and with nowhere for my spirit

And no way through to its last reflection

On darkened glass.  No longer a mother

And nursing my fear, I hear the high drone

Of a circular saw, an arc after

And before, where sound cut back from stone rends

The air, and smoke as dust and stone ascends.

Out of a sense of my own helplessness,

From a lost history the poems come,

An unreachable paralysed distress

Yet agitating vowel and rhythm.

But I was destined to follow along,      

To watch the night and hear its sounds behind

And of so little use to anyone,

That the mute silence magnified my mind,

While fifties neon flickered off and on

Our footsteps going nowhere, a circle,

Her heart held fast to an oscillation

Of fear unending and impalpable.

My life is no more than a retrieval,

A lost meaning, if I have lived at all.

Without truth’s silence how can I begin

To speak when everything else has come

To an end, while fear in its origin

And outcome rehearses then a brief dumb-

Show, a last enactment from memory,

With the end leftover and unspoken,

A terminus impossible to see

Beyond, lengthening shadows unbroken 

At their own source yet inexorable

As their first echoes pulsating always

Through my mind, along impenetrable

Pathways to all the known futureless days

That wait on me and with the silence then,

And the distant voices of lost children.

With no way out I have struggled to say

What happened all those years ago and I

Am still unable to face my own day

Without remembering the reason why

I am driven to write only of such

Things as are lodged beyond the utmost shore

Of memory, submerged beneath the touch

Or reach to and from, at the tidal core

Of time where her life is still leftover

In the vicinity of an open

Doorway, left with fear before and after,

Trapped between its threshold and horizon.

I founder in the currents of the net

Around me and the struggle to forget.

I do not know how long I can go on

Playing for time as I have always done

And pretending to be the same person,

A part of a world where everyone

Else has changed beyond recognition. Who

Am I and why can I not remember,        

I know only that there is no way through

And no way backwards to turn to after,

Just to be alive is the one response

And the last respite a little longer.

Imagination or experience,

Time past was the knowledge and the future

That was left behind in an unlit place,

Avoiding a daylight I could not face.

I do not know how to communicate

With anyone nor do I know any

More what has gone wrong, it is now too late

To salvage anything from an empty

Landscape or from the silence memory

That has long since evaded me. Nothing 

Can alter or prevent such poetry

Or throw off course its downward spiralling

Into its own inexorable hell,

Sometimes the spirit in extremity

Can be heard in the considerable

Unstoppable clamour of history,

The insistent sound of wanting to die

Is a plea for life in the spirit’s cry.

My spirit no longer belongs to me

And I do not know myself anymore,

Somehow in some way it has broken free

And I am abandoned and left to draw

The distant hollows of an empty well.

I exist only in a waking dream,        

A mirror’s lost indecipherable

Words, reflected backwards through light to seem

As time past, and aligned with time future

In an uninhabited city where

The present does not matter anymore,     

And we move as we must in the near glare 

Of arc light in a world I do not know,      

An arena lit by its own shadow.

How can I write with a mind that is not

Entire, a mind that can precipitate

Me into repeated jeopardy, what

Remains is enough to reverberate   

But how can I wait that long not knowing

Who to turn to or how to run or flee

Headlong in a dream’s slow-motion, reaching

For an illusion, a sanctuary

Somewhere in the territory of fear,

Where every turning is a way out

Only to terminate after, further

In the mind’s hell. I turn and turn about

And I am lost, I cannot find my way

Through the wasted years and their disarray.

I have always had to keep things under

Control, keeping the hours within every

Day, trying to write for a time after

And to understand time before, only

The new day seems to matter, left somehow

As something pledged and unredeemable,

Only its sudden ending can allow   

For the drawn out darkening of my soul

And the endless starless nightmare of my

Heart, where there is nothing left nor any-

Thing existing just to tell me who I

Am, to remind me of my poetry

Or why my reason for living has gone,

Still fugitive in unremembered song.

There is no way to prove to anyone

That my poetry will last, not even

To myself, at times when I abandon

The past there is nothing to live for, then

I am left without hope, without despair,

I cannot see where the poems will come

From without the narrative voice of their

Beginning, for their structure bears the sum

Total of my life and everything              

I have believed in, enclosed fast in an

Early interval of locked unending

Fear.  Beyond horizon and the mind’s span,

Drawn from depths of exhausted memory,

Controlled impossible want waits on me.

My whole life has been about survival,

About just getting through from day to day

And finding time enough for a trial

Of words, something to take the pain away.

But the strategy does not work any

More and I am face to face with my own

Silence and the lost words of memory,

Sometimes singled out in dreams, left alone

And unattended.  Time has contracted

Down and I exist now from hour to hour,  

Left behind with all the time I wasted,  

In a poem’s shadow where I cower

And shelter in its anonymity,

Without the refuge of its destiny.

How shall I write a poem my brother

When I hardly know what words I can use,

We who for years hardly knew each other

Can laugh now in the time left and refuse

To be apart anymore, family  

That I missed through the long impossible 

Length of those years, unable to avert

Their happening, unable to control

That they existed at all, while each of

Us lived in our own unknown separate

World trying to remember just enough

To survive, each alone and desperate.

For the rest of my life, from memory,

Her tears will forever remain with me.

What is this darkness that comes upon me

Driving me from sleep and the cold harbour

Of unilluminated memory                            

Where suddenly I can go no further,         

Trapped in the unnavigable silence          

Surrounding me fast on all sides and from

Which there is no escape, a place where once

I foundered, engulfed by a soundless storm,

Endless, fathomless below the surface            

Of the mind’s hull. Almost by chance, only 

The words have been salvaged leaving their trace

Behind and their wreckage to memory,

But the darkness comes back, taking me down

Again, unravelling time where I drown.

I have cut myself off from my own kind

And lived within the shadow of my own       

Existence, unable to use my mind         

Except for poetry and left alone      

And in the dark and in combat with fear,

With the certainty I cannot get through,

Dependent for life itself on a sheer

Last sense, the absolute chance of a new

Poem. The words are always just outside

My reach, forever beyond my knowing,

An onslaught almost from another side

Of time, my ransom or my reckoning,

Measured in syllables when life assails,

And with no way out when the spirit fails.

But the darkness comes back with renewed force

To the fact that my mind has lost its will

To live, once I used to plot the whole course

Of life and now wait without hope until

The end of each hour, still left in turmoil

And unattended and overwhelmed by            

The world breaking into a last recoil

Of language, by tumult, as I try

To salvage a rhythm from a ruin,

And a refrain from my mother’s death.  Why

Was her brief life, still in alignment in

My mind, the sound of wanting to die, I

Have been there and been a part of the drill

In Lowell’s ‘house for the mentally ill’.

Was it for this my mother lived her brief

Hour following in the footsteps of her   

Life, existing alone with a belief       

That her sacrifice was for the future

Of her children, something she would not live

To see, something she could not talk about

While she raised us with what was left to give

And while she left us forever without.

Her last echo drives me into silence

Only to pull me out of it again,

Deaf as a man’s words to his brother once

While refusing to listen to his pain,

And out of the end a poem begins,

I am stunned by the emptiness of things.

Her last echo, how to make it survive

Even a meaningless ordinary

Day, or where to search yet keeping alive

Its source through the void of planetary

Space, there remembering how to listen

In the way I heard her far approach in  

The evening of my first years where often

An empty room opening would begin

A journey nearer to infinity,

To vanish forever, to disappear

Alongside the knowledge of certainty,

Leaving not a trace behind, only fear

Containing an echo unforgotten

And beyond boundary or horizon.

I am so tired I do not understand

How I can go on simply measuring

Out a syllable count and aligning

Rhyme and rhythm on the span of my hand,

There is no way out, it was meant to be

A journey without an end.  Sometimes I

Do not know what is happening to me,  

Why can I not be allowed to sleep, why

The headlong hurtling urgency of time

Wherein I dwell without purpose or rest

Listening for an answer to the rhyme

Of my life, tireless sleepless and oppressed,

And yet just writing about my mother,

In some way makes me feel nearer to her.

This is the hour when imagination

Is allowed to breathe for a little while

And to roam at random to horizon

And back again, opening the locked file  

Of memory and with an effortless        

Turning backwards of time upon itself.

My mind is clear of the day’s detritus

And history sits alone on its shelf

Above the world with time left on stand-by

While words from their silence are disinterred,

Echoing a vacuum as I try

To find the source forgotten and unheard,

And I have grown accustomed to my own

Suffering and to all that I have known.

I have turned my life upside down to write

And to somehow ease the pressure on my

Mind but in so doing I have to fight

With the present for the past and to die

Piecemeal for its meaning every day.   

Sometimes I am woken from fragmented 

Sleep if only to write a single line

And before a new day has been wasted,

Before I am left with nowhere to lay

My head.  Engulfed the words, agitated

The buried words that nothing can confine

Or free, driving me from sleep distracted,

To see for the first time through the light’s heft

The fact that there is so little time left.

It has taken years just to find my voice,

For the words are buried alive somewhere

Deep and so far off that they leave no choice,

At times I feel I can hardly breathe there.

And when day and night are in confluence

And the visible world appears to be 

Upside down, yet something remembered once,

Something containing its own certainty

And leaving me with the power to say

What the earth was like then, but I am left

Afraid after, how to face the new day

Alone, after abandoned and bereft,

The words have become an impossible

Burden and my back is against the wall.

I no longer grieve that I cannot read,

I know it will happen in the future,

Language exists within and with a need

For confluence, the words of another

Are as the company along the way

With voices after that seem to matter

And to communicate a time, a day,

A life, a part of truth to each other,

Something enough to make a difference,

Something almost to hold on to or go

Back to and echoing experience

And knowledge from a source I do not know.

How I have missed turning each unknown page,

This is a loss that nothing can assuage.

How can I ease the pressure on my mind

Wherein I claw my way up slow and sure

As though out of a lost grave left behind 

To the stopped mute silence of the future.

And I am taken over by a need

To breathe and to allow the words to come

As they must, but if only they could lead

Me to the dimension that they come from

Unborn yet alive and unstoppable.

I have grown accustomed to my silence

And the confines of an impalpable

Sealed mausoleum where memory once

Enacted delivered me from its womb

And closed me fast within a nameless tomb.

I watch the silence turning into night

And where I am going I do not know,

The tail-light from planes passing out of sight

Beats in a trail in the distance as though

Each is the one way out of the Babel,  

The night silence that circulates around 

The fixed point of a few stars and the hell

My mind is trapped in, an echoing sound

Unceasing of memory long ago,

That vanished from the earth without a trace

Left behind, and there is nowhere to go

From here, only tail-light the stars efface

Beating a trail through the distance as though

My heart was following after also.

I cannot imagine my life without

Poetry and the long nights of thinking

Aloud with nothing to go on but doubt

And futility and the words coming

Along in a tardy makeshift fashion

With a will of their own, and however

Much I tried, the rhythm and its pattern

Became indissolubly fused after,

Defying everything I believed

In and overturning what I had known,

Until, casting aside the life I lived,

The words took on a meaning of their own.

Those early poems have outgrown their size

And wear new clothes I hardly recognize.

Why do I put this pressure on my mind,

If all of it should be an illusion,

What then, whatever would be left behind

To save me after from oblivion,

For I fear its shadow more than any-

Thing else I know. I grew up with it there

Waiting for my mother over many

Years, an unseen guest, a familiar

Journeyman on the long fugitive night

Walks alone with her, while every year,

With memory stretched beyond utmost sight,

I watched my mother slowly disappear.

I have to go back if only to let

In a time I can begin to forget.

Poetry used to be something quiet,

Somewhere I could lose myself for a while,

A space on earth left empty and to let

To words alone, a place where the dial

Hand can stop and the world can wait outside

And go on looking casual. I dream

Only of sleep and the rhythms are wide

Open and full of intent and they seem      

To want to break themselves on another  

Shore, as I hurtle into overdrive

Losing the chance for rest for a further

Night and wondering how I will survive.

New words for old yet summoning instead

Somewhere for the spirit to lay its head.

It is not grief that startles me from sleep

And that now drives me into unending

Insomnia but something buried deep

And with a span of years beyond counting.

A sense of experience lost and pledged

Once in a time of open sepia,               

An existence sacrificed and salvaged  

After and forever leftover, a

Life surrendered and unredeemable

Folded away the exact way my mind

Remembered, yet still irretrievable,

Lodged deep beyond sleep and since left behind

As dust within sunlight that can never

Settle, insubstantial and solid there.

There are times when I cannot be alone

And the mute words are so far off they seem

Out of my reach, and there is no reason

To try to find them for they seem to mean

Nothing and I am left without purpose   

Or compassion and bereft of language.

Their silence alone enough to coerce

A stunned paralysed mind back to knowledge

And experience, back to the open

Door that was left to stand ajar between

Night and morning, my senses stretched even

To the utmost streets where her life had been,

And only when pushed to this last extreme

Can I find out what the silence can mean.

The end is not yet even within sight

And only the numbers keep me going,

As their far total keeps me from the light

And prevents my fevered mind from sleeping.

But how long can I go on in this way,

How will the unfamiliar be found,

Nothing remains to keep my fear at bay

Or to stop my mind from running aground.

And I am at the mercy of my past,

There is no one I shall meet on the road,

I follow an echo that holds me fast

And pulls me after to an unknown mode

Of time where I no longer feel afraid

To reach for the source where the end is made.

The danger of distance is very near,

I feel it through a night staying awake,

Through darkness and silence an utmost fear,

A journey undertaken for the sake

Of another and I have to get it

Right.  There is no other chance to explain

The cause and what went wrong in the unlit

Streets of a city night, the silent pain

Of her illness and the anguish of years

Of walking until it was light and then

Safe enough to go home, the unwept tears

She kept from us protecting her children

In the present tense without its future,

Yet hiding from us the time without her.

At the end of a long night where do I

Begin and how shall I disentangle

Myself from time after, or satisfy

The terms of language I am unable

To fulfil, and the poem runs away     

From me and yet I cannot set it free.

Awake, weary even to the last day

Of my burden how I long endlessly

For sleep, why can I not just put it down

And still go on living my life after,

Why do I have to struggle not to drown,

Unfolding a life as I founder there,

As though the whole of my experience

Was submerged in the currents of time once.

It is the simple things that bewilder

Me, the inordinate complexity

Of people relating to each other

At times, in a calm and ordinary

Way, that suddenly becomes a minefield

Altering the course of a single day,

Casual words with the power to wield

Lasting influence, a fallout to lay

As vapour at the bottom of a mind.

From the usual and familiar,

The passing voices that are left behind,

A void echoes with the sound of their far

Futility, words that only enter

And hurt and have nowhere to go after.

There is a sense within me of someone

I do not know and who must have been there

Alongside me as another person

For as long as I dare to remember

And yet without hope or despair, exists

Against all the odds and in spite of me.

Memory’s endless reflection resists     

The broken mirror of identity

Where fractured words I could not decipher

Reflected backwards a written Babel,

Left to the jeopardy of chance after,

Left to reach full term alive and able,

And from silence and long surrendered worth,

Words echoing breathe a cry at their birth.

I exist now in the white space between

Memory unsalvaged and the future

Unrealized, an endless waking dream

Where time present encompasses the lure 

Of sleep from which I turn as a bird borne

Upwards and adrift on currents of air,

But I am set on autopilot torn

Apart by a single night and left there

In the daylight with nowhere to go to

For rest or refuge.  Yet how much longer

Can I go on for and what will I do

After, whatever will be left after

Of my life, while attempting to disguise

That I cannot relax or close my eyes.

All I felt was that my life was over

And that the end was already here, time

Itself was left on hold waiting and there

Was nothing left after except the rhyme

Of my life before and its emptiness,

A limitless inexplicable space,

A universe around me, its darkness

Ebbing, engulfing even the surface

Of time.  Nothing seemed to matter any

More as the days dissolved into black smoke

Altering the face of reality

And its hour, yet I dreamed that I awoke

While waiting at the terminus of fear,

The end was echoing already here.

8th August, 2000

There was a great emptiness when I came

Home and the flat was full of wide open

Space that lengthened and deepened in the same

Unlived-in darkened rooms so that even

The reflected sky seemed to disappear,

To dissolve into its own horizon

As I came face to face with my own fear

Beheld through the barrier between one

World and another.  I had reached the end

And there was nothing more that I could do,

Everything was broken, nothing would mend,

There was nowhere to get to or see through

To and yet there was nothing left behind

But planetary space left in my mind.

22nd August, 2000

My whole life has been about poetry,

From the long sleepwalk until my first line,

To the time when the end came upon me

As silence left below a collapsed mine,

And the words that were written in between

Left to fend alone to their own echo

With no one to find out what they could mean,

Enough to recognize them or to know

Them. While the flame and its shadow burnt out,

Drowning even as it tried to survive

Fathomless in the darkness round about

Where words in the current were left alive

In vain, as all the lines that come and go

And awake in dreams I cannot follow.

23rd August, 2000

And I walked away from my poetry

As a mother walking away from her

Children without looking back, I was free

Of a burden and free to remember

Nothing. My mind contained a vacuum

As I stared outward across Hampstead Heath,

Slowly over a window passed the sum

Total of my life, still hidden beneath

The locked jeopardy of a single day,

Night without end, and the enclosed circuit

Inside a psychiatric ward. The way

It was reflected behind me, acute,

Superimposed before me and final

As green seen through darkness is terminal.

24th August, 2000

And for the first time before an empty

Page I no longer know how to begin,

From the start the ending was already

There in the background of my mind, written

Unknown near a region between waking

And early dreams I cannot remember.

An idea to make the silence sing

Again just as it used to in my ear

As I founder in my own erosion,

The lasting amnesia of memory

Has become an unbearable burden

And its horizon too far off to see,

But in early dreams though the colour drains,

The sodium glare of street light remains.

27th August, 2000

How can I describe what fear is like when

I cannot even speak, the words falter

After whenever I try to begin

And meaning is no more than a stammer

And my life’s experience a random

Narrative just one among so many.

If I cannot find out where fear came from,

If I cannot contain its certainty,

Words alone will not make it go away,

There is no release from its jeopardy,

A slow paralysing assault by day,

The endless silence of disparity.

From the beginning I have been afraid,

The end is an echo that will not fade.

31st August, 2000

There is something different within me

For the experience I have been through

Has opened wide the core of memory

And has brought to an end the life I knew.

To realize again that there is no

Refuge and no place to rest anywhere,

As a door that stood ajar long ago

Far into the night always, that never

Could be closed again nor ever shut out

Agony suddenly, a departure

For the last time from a past too far out

To see, from memory and its future,

The streets opening up to the exposed

Stars, to doors ranked before forever closed.

1st September, 2000

Where shall I turn when I cannot go on

And the end is all around me, when fear

Is a black rain drawn along every stone,

Dissolving over London and the near

Distance, as the far sounds of a city

Ebb and echo in the starless concrete

Glare of my mind, abandoned and empty,

Resembling dreams where only shadows meet

Under arc light, an enclosed arena,

Neon lit once, within the outward spread

Of an infinite time, rhythms from a

Poem after its ruin remembered

Still as I press my hand against its wall,

My spirit outside and unreachable.

3rd September, 2000

No one could take anything away from

Me because there was nothing left to give,

A few remembered days and nights or some

Knowledge of truth, even a wish to live

But now beyond recall, for amnesia,

Unknown to me, had taken all the rest.

And I was alive in name only, a

Reflection seen through a window, yet pressed

Into a far time other than this, when

The street was full of the light of evening

While I waited for my mother, children

Played on the far side of the glass calling

To each other until it was empty,

Darkened in the mirror of memory.

5th September, 2000

There is a pressure that builds up inside

Me somewhere deep in the void of being,

In the far undertow of a black tide

That ebbs and flows unknown beyond seeing,

Beneath the surface as a storm at sea

Or the outer calm of recollection

When rhythm is wide open within me

And rhyme audible as oblivion

That exists alongside. Meaning unknown,

Experienced and that I cannot turn

Away from although I turn back alone

Searching a distance I cannot discern,

Without refuge or release or free will

And trapped in a silence that words fulfil.

7th September, 2000

Sometimes my whole life seems to pass before

Me within the darkness of the midday

Glare, I cannot recall anything more

Walking at night with my mother away

From the confusion opening behind

Us and closing forever the road ahead,

And leaving its certainty in my mind

The paralysed silence of things unsaid.

Somehow I stammer out a narrative

Of a life lost and left to circumstance

And in the time left attempt to relive

An existence caught between choice and chance,

Redeeming from time enough to survive

A pledge to keep her memory alive.

22nd September, 2000

What will become of me, how shall I go

Into the dark in silence and afraid,

Stifled in the void of my own echo

With all that I have written left to fade

Empty as the page on which it was made,

How shall I resolve from my own shadow,

An unfinished debt to time left unpaid,

Until the end is reached how shall I know

Just what it is to face the beginning,

And a journey that was set in motion

Before I was born.  In shadow I sing

Of time after, using a notation

Of despair and my life for the vowel

Sounds reverberating within time’s hell.

23rd September, 2000

All I amounted to was left behind

Me afterwards in the mute agony

Of an October night that would unwind

In the aftermath of its history

And there be re-enacted for the rest

Of my life.  I was left in its shadow

To walk the streets alone, lost and oppressed

And left with the unknown I was to owe

To time itself, completely unaware

Of who I was or what I would become,

And the only meaning I had was there

In the night and in the streets I came from,

Where you were always as a fugitive

Without anyone to help you to live.

24th September, 2000

I have always been too afraid to look

Into the heart of light, to turn around

And face the source of the journey I took

Without knowing why. For there on the ground

October rain was moving in a maze

Of its own, a last configuration

From a time that was over yet always

There, blowing wide across the days to come,

In an unceasing suffocating wind

Leaving me in an open vacuum

And with a despair nothing could rescind,

While before me lay the residuum

Of far-falling city rain, a low flame

Elemental I would not see again.

24th September, 2000

There was no way out, you would not leave your

Children behind and there was nowhere you

Could go with them, yet your life lay before

You and yet with nothing to help you through

But a pittance you earned from the café

As casual labour at the weekend,

It was for you the meaning of each day

As you tried to feed your children, the end

Hurtling towards you and then within reach.

We were left in the dark, left to find out

After what had gone before, how a search

For a way out was what you were about,

How the silence of illness opened wide

The realization of suicide.

24th September, 2000