Pater Familias

You keep popping up

In the strangest places.

Walking into a room,

Your face appears,

Smiling the same odd way.

Real or not,

I know you’re there.

My shadow everywhere

Bumps into yours.

I hear your voice

Through doors

Long closed.

Even the dark

Assumes your shape;

You’re here so much,

The monsters under the bed

Have been complaining.

Memoriam

The doomed man  

Hears fireworks he cannot see,

Smells Autumn’s corrosive breath,

As metal salts

Ignite the air.

In his mind’s eye,

A boy,

Lighting a match,

Holding it up for a dare.

A crowd appears

Chanting in fatal glee.

And here in the dark,

The past explodes,

A story unrehearsed:

An effigy on a bonfire.

Making Sense

Our ghost liaison lasted seven years.

Luck or damnation, I’m not sure which.

I still find ectoplasm between my toes

And, now and then, sense

Your image in the glass.

Beer glass, you’d probably add.

I can still hear your voice:

Who’d love you,

If they knew you first?

Mistakes do happen,

Of course.

You spooked me out,

While teaching me the secret of the universe

Amnesia prevents

Me from recounting.

No help to alchemists perhaps;

But what makes me glad

Is that, for a moment in time (where else?),

In your ethereal arms,

Mortality made sense. 

Weather Girl

The weather girl

Has a way with warm fronts

And isobars.

Her tropical gaze

Makes storms seem tame

As she tells you it looks like rain.

Oceans rise

And villages are swept away,

While you’re off making tea.

Her thermal smile

Betrays no irony.

Her image reigns

long after the programme fades,

Leaving no choice

But to trust each new forecast.

Fragments

The photo’s ripped:

Just us,

Kids inbetween,

One face torn off.

A backdrop that day of blue:

Ceanothus, Lilac, Wisteria

Trailing up to our room.

Smiles fixed

On a lens;
The darkroom of trust.

Acceptance can’t rescue

A moment lost,

More sacred than memory:

This missing piece.