This Cared For Life

The world is no longer behind me,

the world is no longer what is yet to come -

                                                           I am now -

I am the true maintenantman, 

my loved impostor is rubber-gloving my catheter,

trying to take his mind from cloudy smell

by pondering on nothingness,

that mirror of my absent thoughts.

                                  I am here as well as now:

somehow I have reversed into life in the moment,

a Buddhist touching enlightenment’s very nerve,

a dog glued to the opening door,

each essence of the nano-mindful.

                                    But what is ‘now’ to me?

Slight sound in the corner that makes me crane my spasmic neck;

gloss-smooth instant of the morning suppository in my anus;

glimpse of scarlet lipstick on the tv advert;

incontinent jerk of my head at each spoonful of forkmash food;

fleeting scent of diesel from where I once laboured.

I tell you, only those who truly live in the moment

can know that vacuum, that unmeasurable void.

                                  And there he is, loving me in return

but craving my former phases of this inexorable entropy

whilst he strives to imagine the empty encryption of my mind,

grapples these words onto a page that can be touched and read.

I hear him intone: “each merciless day two questions toll:

‘if he knew, would this drained, defecated life

weigh more than others sluicing beneath his foreskin,

hosing and swabbing his shit?’

And: 

‘into just how many shapes does love shift?’”

The answer to the first one is: ‘I don’t know’,

And the answer to the second one is:

‘I don’t know’.

I don’t

            know –

those three little words

are my fragile span -

                                       my final frailing mindholds.

← Poems 2014-2017