I cannot handle dead bodies since

I had to shave a dead man’s face,

scrape off sins like blades of glass,

chalk on a board, tick, tick, tick.

His dignity, the Staff Nurse chipped -

Dignity and Choice, the holy script,

but his fingers were done with picking.

I gritted my teeth at his hollow cheeks,

as his eyes followed and his mouth spoke,

before grabbing a skinful of liquid relief,

an all day binge designed to scrub

the pallor and stink of stubble and death

from under my fingernails, off my breath.

 

Talking is easier.

Do you remember the plant

in the top-floor lounge  

that we both so heartily hated?

I never did find out its name.

For me it was merely ugly; for you

those large waxy leaves were its ears,

leaning in closer to steal secrets,

absorbing and storing smoke and speech.

 

I sit beside it now.

The old place closed down, supplanted

by Home Treatment, Star Workers

and voluntary organisations.

The staff were left to rehabilitate

unwanted items of furniture;

my wife took a shine to a table, chairs

and this antiquated listening device.

 

 

I sit beside it now and hear you praise

Around The World in Eighty Days,

tell how your father died too early,

how wicked and unworthy you are,

how little you deserve or desire to live,  

your refusal to take yes for an answer.

Like a priest inside a confessional

I ask you to itemise offences,

just so I can tick them off a list.

Schoolboy misdemeanours

of tuppenny ha’penny pettiness:

not the stuff of formal therapies.

Hardly hanging offences, I state;

you must be a saint or simply don’t

get out very much, waiting for

the responding laugh.

Waiting.

 

Now I see how the brown leather belt

we bought together, that you haggled over

with the market trader, is wrapped around

the bathroom door handle – dying in the toilet,

how very Elvis! - cuts your neck purple,

the angle of your purple shoulders, veins bulging

purple, eyes popping and pleading purple

for five or six days on a life support machine,

popping and pleading an end to purple,

waiting for consensus to gather and grow

as thick and long as your beard.