After you died.
I wanted to book a flight away
from the pain.
I was thinking Tangier.
Hotel Rembrandt?
I wanted to be alone.
Sitting in a café sipping mint tea
Watching a tide of jabadors and veil sail past.
Listen to the chatter,
ebb down toward the real souk
Just above the harbour
A good place to sit and think.
Grief does strange things to us.
.One minute your heart acts like a robot,
next it’s a blizzard of feathers.
It never has the weight of clear thought.
Or the certainty of steel,
let alone the magic of flight.
I could put your books into boxes
and take them to Oxfam
But thoughts of you are now a packing
case full of bird song,
and a chocolate box full of bad jokes.
Corn plasters for the wounded soul,
you would have said.
In Tangier I can repair my life.
Book in and get the dents knocked out.
A respray for the future perhaps!
Find that comfortable place- therapists
talk about in books the colour of cream –
Truisms make lousy crutches
Mindfulness makes me feel opaque.
We deserve a more poetic answers to
life and death.
After you checked out of life I wanted to
book a flight away from the pain.
Ho Chi Minh City perhaps?
Victory Hotel?
The one opposite the Music School.
Where they play the bass so loud the beer
bottles in the bar opposite dance on the counter.
I tell my friends “I’m hanging in there”.
Wherever there is? A ledge with a view?
Five million scooters go past my balcony
If I could get all this on a postcard I would
Perhaps my words fail me .
I really should get a taxi back to reality,
before the sun sinks down into the city
I forget grief is something we are supposed,
to get over.
.
Malcolm Paul
.