Wind cuts through this January night
Slices like a knife through my meagre clothes.
Signs on the road hidden by an iron fog
The cry of the wind is all in vain
Nothing is the same.
I kiss you across this black hole in time.
In the old be-jewelled spider-webbed
Way we kissed tender to kiss long,
Frost-filled graveyard-remains
For the happily insane, a song.
Yew trees shadow against the moon.
No trembling now from scattered runes
Eviscerated by all that time can do to human blood,
And hearts and lips and eyes and brains
In earth-infected graves there is no point in lies
No pretended disguise.
I had once kissed you on a night like this.
Held you close. Toasted you with my eyes.
Shared an ancient consciousness of what it is
To be a woman, to be a man.
Trapped by mortality:
Nothing prepares us for this emptiness.
I stand alone in this freezing unghosted space
My insides squirming like a snake
As I try to make out a palimpsest of names and dates:
Unsoaked in perfume, unattended by lips like raspberries;
Tears do not leave my frost-whitened eyes
There is no possible disguise….