Return to Sender

We knew they would come back some day,
turning up in the morning post,
all the things we gave away.

The day turned plain after a time and
we no longer noticed when night came
or the weather changed
or we ran out of things to say.

So many things remain unsaid.

We climbed into bed,
hunting for language like dreams,
or dreams that might speak,
and in the silence made love,
like a ladder through the clouds,
love in the spaces between us,
searching for heaven or somewhere
dark to hide which is like night
or love or somewhere we've never been.

I forgive you all the hours you were away
and promise to start again.

My Father's Breath

I hold my hand over the candle flame a few seconds and then it is too hot. Earlier today, on an underground train, the tears pouring down my face. All of the memories, always at work but often silent, how they can surface, ah, without warning, and turn a solid day into dust, into dust, turn me into us. A holiday in Paris aborted following the disintegration of my personality. Ah. These may not be the right words but they are the way it feels expressed exactly. Love. All of its manifestations. Memory. All of our hallucinations. Are we just ghosts of a history ah we've been playing out all these years? I remember watching A Question of Sport ah sat on my father's chest - I am five maybe six years old - watching Ian Botham but focusing on breath big man / little boy - same blood, same breath going in going out the breath of my father's chest and me tiny and helpless on the rising island of him Loving it loving it like nothing I've known since the peaceful hopeful body truth of curled up on my father's chest breathing in and out in unison and school tomorrow perhaps and a lifetime ahead no knowledge of pain or modernity - no heartbreak / no search engine and implacable love unparalleled big man / little boy no sense of what's coming of what will come I have remained that child (in many ways) Have remained and today when everything feels so sharp and bright and like I've been asleep for so many years and here in this body is the memory of a time when nothing was named and things just happened and simply breathing was enough. We are just a history of ghosts a bedtime story repeated ad nauseum my love for a man who no longer exists my heart a search engine returning no results.