Absence: A Poetry Collection

A Day Just Like This One

A day just like this one –
ice bound, brittle. Crisp snow,
the caw of jackdaws broken
on bare branch, sky sketched
with the outline of other birds.
Nameless, naked to the cold that
draws its breath from the
distance between stars dead
for an aeon. Their deafening
silence. It was then that they
burned, but if the man cried out
then the screams were muffled by
the thaw that followed the same
stars’ dim light, the eternity
between us and them.

---

On Faith

Here there is no room for faith,
only an abiding. To endure the
sapping heat of day, the depths
of the night pooled in those eyes,
parched lips that will not admit
to anything other than the numbness
the pills’ transitory comfort offers.
Here there is no room for denial,
only the arithmetic of emaciated flesh,
the bones of disbelief. What words of
comfort could you have offered, what
help proffered? How quickly you sought
instead to flee the oppressive heat of
that room, feeling only revulsion for
the necrotic flesh, its fetid odour, but
above all the continuing absence the
productive, weeping sores yet betray.

---

Dumb

Now we have no words,
but there is the rain, a
language with which we are
still unfamiliar. Vowels,
consonants with which we might
parse the language of water,
of blood, which too will
always find a way, which has
its own individual language,
strange on the tongue, placing
similar limitations upon us.
Sutured flesh, bag, the dry
crack of a freshly snapped rib.