Sedative

Up until my 20th year I've used pain to distract myself from sadness.
My eyes, poked, cry out nightmares,
I move through the big gray gothic pyramids distracted
Is it worth investing more in dreams than live a life that seems so long?
And only 20, nearly 21

Life seems to start so fast and end so slow.
I lived in clouds, high above the numbers living crude and rough and raw.
The tenements so loverly.
The people rolling on in colours and classes.
The social pit seen as vividly as though it were a concrete thing,
tower blocks head butting the skyline

Death had placed it's mark upon my grandmother.
She smoked her cigarettes down to the bone,
She'd quit, but her mind had slipped
so she clutched at Poe, flustered, her skin like rolling papers.
She tested my Mother's patience.

It weighed like lead at the bottom of parchment.
On the curtains, walls and rugs.
Particularly the curtains, they were sensitive.
They sense death and echo it like dogs.
So I hated visiting her, and I hated her visits.

Her constraint gave the impression she was deep in thought;
and her constraint was all her grace.
I dressed and attended to this shell daily
and was told 'you're an angel'

Still, you can feel in things unclosing.
FATE, spelled out in capitals.
There is no getting round fate.
Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered waters.

Had I seen the low hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors
on the calm black water where the stars slept,
I should've warned my mother
But time, like an ever rolling stream,
bears all its souls away

I ignored her muffled cries.
A cry that began muffled, in sleep,
that swiftly rattled upwards. and shook foundations

The infinite rolled white from her nape to her back.
An image embedded in a young mind
that wept for the peace of pastures,
the peace of furrows which alchemy prints on foreheads.
And not the sunken eyes of death.

She had been blue eyed, lovable.
Yet she was a woman of which we knew nothing

My emotion beside the coffin? None.
I stared rather at the cross, fixedly.
Too young to understand the loss.
A stargazing Tom Thumb.