Something I found and dragged out from a folder in my computer, written long ago. Written with all the unsubtlety of youth.

A Friend
__________________

when we take photos together
we are never alone
always, you and me
separated by two or three.

when we go on dates and dinners
it is always with the others
with friends and shouts and cheery noises
your laughter amidst many voices.

I worked my way through the sunlit crowd
the implacable distance of people
through photos and functions and countless yearbooks
down queues, in meals, through changing looks.

I have been a patient smiling face,
I have waited madly by the phone
written too many poems, heard too many songs
watched you through the spaces where your library books belong.

I found you finally in the crowd
I reached my hand to turn you round
and you did, but in cheerful agreement
with someone else’s call, and your gaze was distant.

when the albums have ended, and the tapes run out of time
the voices swallowed by distance, and your footsteps too faint
I tread gently through the madding crowd still
looking for your traces, and your footsteps to fill.

I cannot help it, I miss you so much
the delight of your laughter, and the surprise of your touch.

the way of love

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love,
I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love,
I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,
and though I give my body to be burned and have not love,
it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long and is kind.
Love envieth not.
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doeth not behave itself unseemly.
Seeketh not her own.
Is not easily provoked.
Thinketh no evil.
Rejoiceth not in inequity, but rejoiceth in the truth.
Bareth all things.
Believeth all things.
Hopeth all things.
Endureth all things.
Love never fails.
But where there be prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be tongues, they shall cease,
whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I fought as a child,
but when I became a man I put away childish things.
For now we see though a glass dark plain, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then shall I know even also as I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love - these three,
but the greatest of these is love."

_______________
1 Corinthians 13
King James Bible

Biblical verses at their finest stand unsurpassed as demonstrations of how the prosody of wisdom runs in perfect natural counterpoint to the rhythms of poetry... It strikes me somehow that words of truth, the lyricism of poetry, and the subject of love are strangely, innately attuned to each other. These verses from Corinthians are a peerless combination of the three.

Growing up is sometimes an unaccountably stale, rancid activity.

It doesn't always entail self-improvement, enlightenment, sudden wisdom or the insights of maturity. Maybe it doesn't even involve change.

What it does involve, however, is aging. Sitting there, getting older, watching the soporific seconds play themselves out on the clock, ticking themselves to death.

It's time for dinner.

I can always find a little comfort during dark times in the simple, cheerful words with which Shakespeare ends his oeuvre, in the closure of The Two Noble Kinsmen:

"O you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have, are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off
And bear us like the time."

For all the unattainably profound thoughts about humanity and the world that Shakespeare must have had throughout his career, it makes me glad that his last lines are words of comfort and good cheer.

the last poem

This is the last poem, overdue words
ingredients gone sour on the label of a can
words long past their expiry dates
too long embalmed by memory
and pickled by regret
floating like an embryo in a silent goo.
they have tumbled off the caravan
inertia overcome
words eating the dust.

This is where I bury a life:
here lies the doom of a half-formed sentence
a time capsule of an incomplete past
of unfinished thoughts, unfulfilled wishes
some half-forgotten dreams, a fraction of time.
the inheritance of memory, given to the wind
those things that flickered around
the sundial of a life
winding down to the end.

This is the last evening
the sky heavy with the thoughts of the day
when buses ponder at every stop
and men wear eyebags weighed down with words
having a think or two over tea.
the clouds are dark with question marks
and the weatherman's worries condense, and fall.
from you, the trail of a plane like a farewell from the sky
for me, unspoken words and a dampness not yet dry.

This is the last time, this is the end
the resting-place of stories too broken to mend
seeds will not grow when they are six feet under
too deep for tears to reach or hopes to plunder
this is the last poem, a wish too forlorn to rescue
and its last word must belong only to you.

____________________

Too much has been thought and felt, wondered about and imagined, forgotten and realised much too late. It is over, all of it. This is the last poem, at least for a while.

Kierkegaard

Some of my favourite Kierkegaardian lines from Works of Love, certainly worth a read:

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing which we cannot see with our eyes, then first and foremost we ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would we not then be deceived? We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. We can be deceived by appearances, but we can also be deceived by shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see? What is more difficult--to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who awake, is dreaming that he is awake? Which is sadder, the sight that promptly and unconditionally moves one to tears, the sight of someone unhappily deceived in love, or the sight that in a certain sense could tempt laughter, the sight of the self-deceived, whose fatuous conceit of not being deceived would indeed be ridiculous and laughable if the ridiculousness of it were not an even stronger expression for horror, since it shows that he is unworthy of tears."

Philosophers who write like that should consider an alternative career as poets.

Love

I walk about all night and fall sick in the day
Days I spend with eyes burnt out and nights with eyes alive
Each evening I will myself to rise and walk
And energy like ether fills me.
I pull on fancy pants and shiny suits
Like a madman in the dark
Lasso my spotted tie on a veinous neck
Snatch my cowboy hat from below my bed and
Fill white leather shoes in a hop. My fevers flee and all
Exhaustion escapes as I hit the midnight pubs
With disco dancing, and bursting music
That fills my soul with sound.
The faces of women I met and loved
Were so many kisses, promises and vows
So many apparitions and light-hearted phantoms
Inspired, interesting, imaginary imps
With ease I willed them disappear with the dawn
In the crazy nights I would do anything for them
In the sober days, nothing.

Sometimes I fall sick and can’t get up
I have to send for the doctor.
When the fever is real there’s no
Imagining it’s imaginary, it will not thus
Go away.

One evening, in the twilight, I couldn’t get up
I willed myself to, but I couldn’t
Each side of the bed was the wrong side, somehow
And I couldn’t chase my fever away.
I coughed my lungs out, but a face was stuck in my throat
My business ties could force nothing out.
Something was upset, but I ate my breakfast with appetite
I walked about all day and fell sick at night.

_______________________

Some things are imagined too easily, others are realised too late.