Broken Flowers, Dying, Hallelujah – April 7

For John (happy birthday)

 

“if youre going to china to write, dont.

go to china to die,

and die so that you can live.”

when april showers break may flowers, and a lonely eye looks in tired frustration out the window where it’s grey and grey it comes in heavy like starting over from out the ash and refuse of the scorched and burned forests of where we once were, she turns her head down.

a little blood seeped out from under the cling wrap and into the sheets in the nighttime, which I guess can only have been expected.

meanwhile, her mother’s passed, another day and lifetime past, a piece of you taken, laughing, keeping your mind off it, or God knows what else, thinking of singing, travelling, burning bridges, making more smoke to shroud the things once seen but no longer wanting to be seen.

it was like an over-ride, in the act, through the haze of whiskey, where all transgressions are allowed, forcing what was not wanted, the head to the heart, saying look out below, and in the morning, broken, hungover.

and the missus misses when the aching surges, but mostly there’s plenty else in store to buy your time, to buy you time, to remind you of nothing but time that will either take your life or take pieces of you away, but maybe your load is lighter, glory be to God.

maybe your photos and your poems and your little stuffed toy lost, taken, like flowers broken in a lost haze when you were too strung out after days after days of train travel, like a benchmark, washed down dancing and wanting, aching, the head and the heart, the head and the heart, but maybe, pieces falling, peoples falling, fading like warning signs of expectations on crumbled notes from years ago, it’s no longer real.

when i still love you is only just a phrase and I could love you is only just a phrase and I once loved you is only just a phrase.

Now. Here.

when I wrote her on her birthday and she never wrote me back. when I wrote him on his birthday and he never wrote me back. when I wrote her on her birthday and hallelujah! she wrote me back and I wrote her back and I wrote her back and I wrote her back and she never wrote me back.

broken flowers, in bed for days recovering from surgery, drinking something to sustain something but maybe ‘some’ is enough, maybe nothing further is needed.

love once loved, replaced by absence, is the true definition of dying.

but still I stand skeptical of definitions.

so look again, to the definition of living. so maybe, this is just to say:

hallelujah.

for the first time, it sounds like Hallelujah, for the first time.