Sorry for your loss is the wrong way to say it.

It is customary, with last goodbyes, when someone has passed away
to use the words I'm sorry for your loss. That is the right thing to say
but I don't see how or understand
why that's the sentence we use
when people we love pass away are nothing we could ever lose.

We lose keys and glasses and their cases,
we lose bank cards and lose our places
in queues, lose wallets, phones, lose track of time
these are things we're sorry about losing but they can be replaced
and didn't matter all that much,
but people- Ella- is not a pair of shoes
or the sweater you intended to wear,
or whatever it is you swear you saw a minute ago, somewhere.

These things can go and well be fine
despite complaining about banks and the please hold the line
or going to lost property bins, or to find security-
it doesn't work when you say, "I'm sorry you lost a memory."
Because we don't really lose it. Ella has never really gone.
In fact, in more than just memory but in presence, she keeps us going on.

I don't know about any of you but the Ella I know and knew
is nothing lost. She's still with us, giving Nanny a kiss in the backseat,
spilling marbles all around her mother's feet. In the night,
I've heard her talk to me, not even in  my sleep, but her voice
at last telling me that, finally, I'm getting things right.

She'll never be lost to any of us at all, so irreplaceable
and I feel I am walking in her shoes
down every UCL hall, and so the sentiment of sorry for your loss  
doesn't apply. Ella is someone we miss, not something we will lose.
Flickering in memory,
visiting in dreams, in echoes,
and staying with us. How can anyone
or anything be lost
if it never really goes?

Here Be Dragons

He was reading a book called 'Here Be Dragons' but there wasn't anything in it about dragons. It was full of empties. He read between the lines and all the absences pressed between the pages that nobody else could see. It made him afraid. He tried to make a list of things that he was afraid of, so it would make some sense, but there were no words for that paper either. He was afraid of everything he didn't know. Everything he was yet to know. Somethings that could happen and felt like they somehow would happen- and should happen?- and they hadn't happened ever before, and that was perhaps what frightened him about this future he had. They say you hold your future in your hands. No wonder his were shaking so much all the time. He was afraid of the unknown places that he was headed for and what he would find there. He wasn't scared of dying or of planes or of spiders or heights or needles. He couldn't be afraid of dragons. He didn't believe in dragons.

Enough

I wrote this in the space of a few minutes without stopping. I guess that's the kind of spontaneous Kerouac went on about and I've never been any good at, but I've decided to stick to his rules and not go back to revise anything. Right, no rewrite, here it is:

Enough,
I think I seem I am I think
I am enough,
I think,
I am not pretty.
as beautiful as water
(from a tap) but enough
of a pile of human teeth,
not grown-up but grown
from troubled daughter,
(far enough from little brat)
so please, no need
for looking underneath
the words I say-
that's quite enough.
I think I seem I am I think
I am okay.

Summer daybreaks

I don't like this time of year-
summer's breath down my neck,
chased up sleepless from shorter nights, tired and dry,
hands that were shaken by day, the one before
still aching and sore- day breaks to brittle hours,
sunlight strips, sandpaper scratches,
at the corner of an eye
and all the clutter catches
at the throat's back, dust kicked up
from summer's track- day breaks the thirsty flowers.

Clock face

Still, flat hands
tick time away-
filling up boxes,
making empty space.

I don't know this form
and who it is for.
only stay and still
wait and count
the passing clouds
each passing hope-

hope for time, hope none is waste
hope whatever it is was worth the wait

but then there is more time
and there is more space.

It's a long time to look and see
only one flat, still clock face.

One of those days

It seems, somehow I've grown into the grown-up shoes

and I don't know when I grew

because only last week I was still seventeen

but today I'm twenty-two. 

Unheard of

Here's what I have learnt about the phonetics of loss.

They sound something like this:

(which is to say, silence)

it's a note I've never heard anyone sing

and it's note that someday I will find, 

come morning, sleep has left behind.

This sound, like those in an old lullaby

until found, I can know only as goodbye,

as milkteeth underneath a cotton pillow,

as the sounds that I hear now:
(the black bedtime echo).

One of many

A stumble first, one of many, but then the thin-thin-
thinking-ridiculous-manic-hideous-and-forgot-
ten times as bad as it used to be, as it was be-
four times as loud as your in-
tension headaches, and those other pain-
fulfilling nothing so you really can't com-
plain and simple, nothing all that spec-
shall we try again, once over? Try a sec­ond t-
I'm not enough, I don't think, to  be some-
one stumble, this one time, another time, and it's one of many.

Blind spot.

For a moment, fastened at the bus window,
I consider what living without windows would be like.
On the other side suddenly there is an infinity,
the street is paved with star-stone, dust matters are astral
and I am wondering where on earth in the universe I am.

He told me that a moment asts ninety seconds
but it was gone and the grey came again
before I could count, before a blink or a beat
of heart or of hands, so I don't think
I can say I have really looked for what I would miss,
the sights most treasured by my sore eyes,
or really given blindness a moment's thought.

Mirror(Me)

This is meant to be confusing. Is she talking to someone or to her reflection and is someone talking back? Who is she looking at? Intended to be read firstly as one whole poem, left to right, then read as three separate poems, in the columns, left and centre and right. 

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