laws of conservation

laws of conservation

I’ve been in mourning forever,
grieving I’m told has a shelf

life, so does love, it decomposes
into something slighter,

something more human, the vestige
of loss taking different shapes

and forms with time, turning to
peat, soiling the palms for their

indiscriminate scooping and handling
of it all so you can’t tell one from the

other, it’s a process, this, of fertilising
angst until you’re done, vaporised

to fumes; our physics professor once told
us matter is never destroyed, grief is

matter, it’s much the same, I’m much
the same, I’m sat suspended mid-air in

the spaces somewhere between longing
and despair, their odours obdurate,

coiling about my person when I move
or lay myself down on the edge

of a day, it’s an act of pointless
ablution, this forgetting and forgoing

because it’s not water that must do
the trick of washing and waking here

but what remains of time and of me in
my constant cleansing of my crests

and contours, my neck, chest, midriff
down to my ankles that are rankling

still in bits and bobs of memory and
memorabilia that I sift, stubborn like

soot, like sorrow, hung in threads
and filaments and what was once

organic, in its purest form of anguish,
now maps marked in lines and

lineaments living inside me

~~