A Multitude of Sins

[billy]

I cannot handle dead bodies since
I had to shave a lifeless face
and scrape off sins like blades of glass, the two simile work well together, bugger, i read it as grass. now i'm not so sure
like chalk on a board, as if death squeaked.
His dignity, the staff nurse ticked –
Dignity and Choice, the Holy Script, this and the next two lines feel awkward in that they're hard to follow
but his fingers were all done picking,
I gritted teeth at his hollow cheeks,
as his eyes followed and his mouth spoke,
then grabbed at a skinful of liquid relief:
an all- day binge designed to scrub
the pallor and stink of stubble and death good image.
from under my fingernails, off my breath.

Talking is easier.
Do you remember the plant
in the top-floor lounge
that we both so heartily hated?
I never did find out its name.
For me it was merely ugly; for you
those large waxy leaves were its ears,
leaning in closer to steal your secrets,
absorbing smoke and speech. great stanza but i can't connect it to the 1st except as a memory

I sit beside it now.
The old place is closed down, supplanted
by Home Treatment, Star Workers
and Voluntary Organisations.
The staff were left to rehabilitate
unwanted items of furniture:
my wife took a shine to a table, chairs
and this antiquated listening device.

I sit beside it now and hear you praise
Around the World in Eighty Days,
urge me to read it – I did, it was rubbish –
and tell how your father died so early,
how wicked and unworthy you are,
how little you desire or deserve to live;
your refusal to take yes for an answer.

Like a priest inside a confessional
I ask you to itemise your sins,
so I can tick them off a list:
schoolboy misdemeanours
of tuppenny ha’penny pettiness –
not the stuff of formal therapies!
Hardly hanging offences, I state,
you must be a saint or simply
don’t get out very much.
Waiting for the responsive laugh.
Waiting…

Now I see how the brown leather belt
we bought together, that you haggled over
with the market trader, is wrapped around
the bathroom door handle
and cuts your neck purple, the angle
of your purple shoulders, veins bulging
purple, eyes popping purple
for five or six days on life support;
pleading for an end to purple, waiting
for consensus to gather and grow
as thick and long as your beard.

hi ray

i stopped doing the usual line by...
i saw and read some great images, some really good lines of poetry but i couldn't read them in an ordered way. it could be and probably is just me but i kept getting lost inside the piece. i'm sure only a small edits would be needed to add a little more clarity to it.

thanks for the read.