It only took a week to say goodbye

[Keith]

Sunlight streams silent on pallor mortis,                                   

with a kiss, I quietly pass warmth onto you                             warmth and love

and hold my hair as it falls                                                                care

damp on the grey of your cheek.                                                  and something like denial.

The difficult calls are being made,                                                       

he can only chew the words                                                                good description for words unsaid

so I swallow them for him, hard as the red plastic phone.                  

I sound like a mourner in this fake monotone drone.                           this stanza seems to show the subject dissociating.

Curtains close and roast to ash                                         how you describe that wall when a beloved one dies strikes hard.

hands held out to be took and shook,                      

sympathetic smiles, wrinkles of the past.

Your music reminds me of Saturday nights.                  somehow i see the funktioning self putting up happy music to the funeral meal, which is inappropriate and at the same time... not.

Ham and piccalilli on buttered crusty bread,                                

saggy settees and late night TV,

those were the times we held each other

and I needed your comfort the most.                           this raises questions... but they don´t have to be answered, it´s enough that the need that is now unfulfilled is described to add to the poem.

Foot falls wet on a mountain path,                                                     

dust drops soft to cobwebbed grass, I look for a sign             this spot.. makes me think of rewalking a route of beautiful memories... laughing as a certain place is found.. and crying at the realization the memory itself can´t be repeated in life.

to find this spot again and I laugh

before I cry, as I do every time.                                            happiness can be so close to sadness. love this ending.

it´s in misc, so no comments on tech stuff (i wouldn´t have some anyway).

Hi vagabond
Thank you for such considered comments, very much appreciated, it's good to know how the poem comes across. Best Keith

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the penultimate stanza is special. i remember well the saggy cushions and piccalilli with ham

Thank you Billy, I've just bought a French stick and made myself some for tea, and call the cholesterol cops I used real butter.

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almost seemed
my commenting
might interrupt the solemnity
of this beautiful poem.
but it would be selfish
not to tell you
how wonderful it is.


nibbed

Your very kind nibbed, thank you Keith