State of Decay
After his death we found his book
of unfinished
poems left like rotting beached whales.
There was very little picking left
apart from the eyes
and we couldn’t bear to look at them.
14 December 1988
I have half a dozen notepads in my office going back years and years. Within them you’ll find drafts of poems and paragraphs that ended up in novels but mostly you’ll find stuff I could never do anything with, that I returned to time and time again and finally gave up on. In some cases there’re complete poems but mostly it’ll just be a few lines that, at the time, meant something to me and now I wonder why. A few that got away:
The truth is always there
in the blackest lie.
It’s there, in a pause,
in the back of the eye.
###
Tell me I’m a good boy.
Tell me everything’s all right.
Give me an ‘A’
and look me in the eyes
when you say it.
###
This is an object of intent.
It is also a poem
and not just because I say so.
It contains form and motive.
###
It’s hard to think of memories
as chemicals
but I suppose that’s all they are
at the end of the day.
It’s a wonder science hasn’t found
a cure for them yet
or at least a way to drown out
the pain.
###
Innocence decays,
it rots before you
and where you begin
it ends.
###
The more things change
the more our staying the same
feels so wrong.