On Grief

(a)

First I fell from a window and thought
I'd never reach the ground. I heard a snap
in the heart of my back.

A door opened in the fog. I very quickly
fled inside it.

Once there I closed my eyes and tried to imagine
what it feels like to be dead. So hard and hard
I tried. I very quickly failed.

Somehow when I found myself walking the steppe
it wasn't like opening my eyes. More that
I was slowly woken from the frost
by heavy blinking.

This is when the wind started speaking.

(b)

The sky hung a giant keyhole on a twinkling peg. I remember
a violet canopy above, an alien shade, a picture. I remember
women in hospital beds, and coughing. I remember clicks of
antiseptic dispensers. I remember a view over a city. I remember
a man found dead in his car. I remember a young woman hit
on a bicycle.I remember a man like me
kite-flying on a beach, and falling.

It is possible that I remember so that
I don't lose the language of the dead.

(y)

Hades is the keeper of the Dead and Cerberus his doggy. If I had known better I never would have tread the steppe to cross the Styx and risk my breath for the sake of knowing when to stop. Loving the willow next to my bed and from a balcony the size of a small country I looked over a kingdom I didn't have, a land I would inherit. The Prince is a greedy, violent liar. It is necessary to love him. I have to love him so that, from balconies, from high places it is he who flies away,
and not my body. Hades is the keeper of the dead and Cerberus his doggy; and as I tread the steppe to cross the Styx, it was a She that handed me a thread.

Sometimes the moon is the best weapon
against loneliness.

(o)

You had to happen because stories are the same across the ages. Orpheus's fate is everyone's fate. If only, to not look; to only hold your hand and swim upwards to some freedom. If only, but in this too I failed.

This 'you' is
the snap in the back of my heart.

(H)

I hum a tune to make myself feel better. I have found this to be the most effective.

I could think of it as sleeping. The grief, I mean, and not the dying. Like walking on a beach that's always sunset, stepping on plastic bottles and piles of bones.