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Eighteenth Day Elegy 

'Plodder through midnight rain, 
Question me again.' 
- Seamus Heaney, Casualty 

Life is a sequence of blinks, it flashes in 
and out continually. 
Until it doesn't anymore. 
Moments, 
connected like dots in yesterday's sky 
have gathered into clotted clouds. 
Gaunt winter of sunless nights, of rain; 
of fallen cutlery, fuchsia plates; and wind 
weeping inside this vacuum of death. 
Points in time nailed to agony's cross 
where he is remembered 
to have been smiling goodbye, 
to have left negatives, like fingerprints, 
inside closed eyes, 
to have betrayed frailty's tell-tale voice, 
where he is placed high 
and worshipped 
while we try to make sense of this, 
dissect question-marks like insects. 
Treachery of a day, where reason is found 
in the grass on its head- 
for we are the dead: 
the living, left behind, 
crawling in and out of holes in life 
like worms in sand of no second-chances; 
shadows kneeling in prayer, 
attracting dust like brittle stamp collections. 
Words mean nothing now 
like froth upon days 
of knotted recollection. 

His memory, the water 
in which we dissolve like tablets, 
in which we pretend 
grief is not what suppurates 
from wrinkled conscience. 
"Time.  Give yourselves time," people say, 
leaving ignorance stained upon silent infuriation. 
Time is all we have 
and they know nothing of it. 
It eats away at sanity like acid burns 
cavities into skin; erases 
laughter like candles melt in blobs 
of their own wax; tosses 
remains of who we were, ripe tomatoes, 
at granite walls of logic; reasons 
that a revolution around logic's sun 
is enough to mend; says 
a year has gone; and we believe it. 
Days, a mingling of animated thunder 
through confusion's twisted hourglass 
where truth is a crumpled shirt 
out to dry on bedlam's wash-line. 
Tobacco and caffeine, the means to settle 
turmoil's scarlet flower. 
Coelacanth head swims, knowing 
time is moot. 
Stoned on misery, suicide like cocaine- 
where liquorice moon sags in tomorrow's window 
and woollen eyes weep in tongues: cry, cry 
to some magnificent god whom they cannot see nor touch. 

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