Tell Me What to Do

Be strong, be firm,

Be sensible, though

the child in your arms is crying.

Set it down and walk

away.

Teach it to stand alone,

though you both feel bereft

and broken when separated.



Feel love but don't express it,

For fear of it's fragility

popping in the air of reality,

or it's magnetism making

everything cling;

all the things it touches

sticking and hanging and dragging along

beside you.

The Pied Piper of hearts.


Also;



Le mot ne doit pas être prononce,

Ne dis pas le mot,

Ne le dites pas,

Le mot non parle.


(amour)


For speaking the name of something

has the potential to

bring it fully into being,

Just sufficiently for it to

die.







There is strength in silence so

they say and you believe

in keeping your trap shut

tight when the weather

howls.

Walk away from the fight,

Try not to keep awake at night,

Keep well and keep going,

On and onwards through

the storm.


Until one day,

you come upon something.




There is your mother lying,

dead in her named coffin,

and though it is not her face

peeping out of the silk counterpane,

(was her body insufficient to be dressed),

nor is it the cartoon shape of the casket

itself

that causes you to catch your breath,

but her name.

Not Mum,  nor Mother,

but the one never called

by anyone else since baptism,

the one now, it seems,

called only once again by God

to come



and you see it

there,

reiterated,

loud in it's glaring clarity;

Her full and formal name

engraved so deeply,

into brass,

upon her lid

nearby waiting,


to cover her from view forever.


And though your thoughts are shattered

by its existence,

and you know there's no sense

in trying to rub it out,

or cover it up,

You won't

disturb her peace by crying out again

or crying outwardly at all now.


For you know no use for superfluous shows of

overflowing emotion.

Not now.





You understand she was due to die,

that we all have

a time and God will take us,

when we're ready, usually before

we expect and after

we know.

That's what you were taught,

Along with other things like





don't talk about your troubles

for life itself is only trouble;

It's hard and then you die,

for some, not all, apparently,

though I suspect it is the same

for everyone.



And :



Don't look at the meat on the plate,

It's normal for people to cut and

carve and burn the flesh of another

living being who cried

for mercy.


That's how we live.



You must:



Cut and eat and chew and swallow

and be grateful that you eat

and do not starve, like children

far away in hot and barren lands

where water dried and disappeared

like tears.


You must understand that:



All your howling and starving and

wasting the food on your plate

and the flesh on your bones won't

save the little children for

they are lost.



In this wasteland of being,

Sometimes we ask:



Tell me again what to do.

I've forgotten how to be.



And the response is always;

Nothing.

Do nothing for

there is only nothing

to be done.




As time goes by

and the nothing grows

into a vast enormous cavern

of longing and loneliness

and despair under the weight of all

the sorrow

until



Until one day,

Instead of wondering what,

what is it I can do,

In the midst of all this nothingness,

I think.


Now.


Give me the pen now,

I think I can write it how

it was,

And how I think it should be

now.

And it's bathos.

Only bathos.

And I know it,

but it's all

I can fill in the void.