Undying death (all the deaths we die)

For Michael Onsando, who insisted I should write about 'death in small doses'. This is also possibly the darkest poem I have written.

Quotidian death

He has eyes the colour of doves.

You half expect them to take wing.

He sits there playing with his phone,

from time to time raising his head

as if to verify he is actually in the room.

These days he doesn’t give away much.

He used to be different: a closed book,

but one I knew was there,

solidly occupying the same earth as me.

These days he is an ephemeralness.

He occupies a body; clothes.

But it seems as if his inner being

went somewhere, or at best

doesn’t visit his body as often.

He is not quite like a ghost.

Ghosts are grey, often menacing,

and sometimes dangerous.

His eyes are the colour of absence.

He has become like an abandoned tipper

from which life falls noiselessly in the dusk.

Even rust won’t touch him.

It is hard to tell when he began to depart:

it is difficult to track the progress of a shadow.

Death isn’t like a sundial.

I am afraid one day I shall find

he has turned into a mummified

boneless unbeing ambling about.

I am afraid he will not know how to die.