INNER WAIT 
Re-reading Rilke

The spider is at peace

In its own inner weight

The bird soars free, alone.

I sit down here, looking up

Balancing my inner wait

In my essential loneliness.

The spider sees its legs, move

The bird sees its wings flap but

I see my hand like a claw

clawing, a pen.

For my family:

A STAGNANT MEMORY

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I awoke in a real reality just seconds after
my life support was switched off, declared dead. 
Somewhere in-between, I must have been drifting
in and out of life and death.  Don’t know why
I didn’t drift to the other side?  The bond of love

held me in poetry in motion. 

I think that’s why I am a writer, memory is writ
under my skin,This wasn’t a Jungian dream
or a Yeatsian realm of spiritual wonder, this was a locked-
in nightmare of darkness and sorrow,.

I had no sense of time, it was as if I was left out in the dark. 

A domestic servant in yellow, cleaning around the bed 

gave me a smile and a drink of water 

but spoke another language.

One minute I was by the bed at home reading a book

by Ray Carver, the next,I was on the floor unable 

to walk the legs cut from under me.  I crawled into
my mother’s room asking her what was happening
that’s how suddenly it happened.

I think you’re having a stroke!

This was the veteran woman of five strokes
and her humane Dublin wisdom pulled through
and I was following her footsteps.  You can't issue blame

on to much drinking or smoking if it’s in the family blood
there isn’t much you can do, It’s going to happen
whether you like it or not.  My lifestyle was to rich
the clinical smell of unsmelt death lingered through
the ward the smell wafted through the corrridors. 

I checked my self for lost limbs, paralyzed down
my right, I tried to say thank you to a nurse
I saw the words in my mind’s eye coming along my brain but 

when they reached my mouth they got lost.

2.

I hallucinated a man behind the bed cutting bodies
with a chainsaw throwing body parts on a skip
and I was next, I gripped the sheets

and took the white knuckled ride

of imaginative nightmare.

I thought the nurses were out to kill me
I had no sense of form, I had lost 

all memory, there was nothing on my mind
like a newborn in an adult body

I drifted back into limbo.