January

Last Year...

was not the best of years.
Friends went,
Leaving bits of themselves behind:
Books, lists of things to do,
Diaries that widows were afraid to open.
Then in spring a woman I once loved
Took me to a graveyard where her shadow was buried,
Then she was gone again.
There were no goodbyes.
Indifference filled the gulf where they might have been.
By summer everything that had ceased to happen
Ceased to happen all over again.
Words spoken with great passion
Were airbrushed from the soul.
Autumn came, nursing cancer and terror.
In winter I convalesced amongst the dead,
Sat writing it in a room that smelt of nutmegs and dust,
And it seemed the years had passed so quickly
That they were like snowflakes falling into flames.

BP, a draft