You Know That Feeling...

You’re exhausted; you’d give anything
for sleep. Take, yet another sleeping pill,
except, pills don’t work; not anymore.
Wander from room to room – from bed
to settee, and there they are; her scrapbooks,
her clothes, her art-deco vases, her CDs –
piles of sheet-music, her mobile phone.
Open the fridge to grab a beer;
it needs defrosting. The whole flat’s
a proper pigsty. Kid yourself

you’ll be OK with it soon – but aeons
from now...Not one speck of dust.
See your face in the kitchen table;
mirrors, grin back at you. Not a cushion
out of place. You’ll be daydreaming
out of the window; imagine being
the neighbour’s cat...prone, in a clump
of sweet rosemary; chance to play
‘Who Dares Wins’, with a Kite
roller-coasting the thermals...

You’ll be writing a story, or a poem, and
for one split second, you’ll forget how
to spell the simplest of words...like ‘rose’,
or ‘home’, or ‘gone’. Wondering, are there
two ‘mm’s in accommodation, and
just one ‘c’, or the other way round?

You’ll feel like a foreigner, studying
another language; may as well be Mandarin.
‘Rose’, you’ll type, over and over
until it looks right. Repeat to yourself,
time after time, “She’s gone.” Then,
and only then, you begin to believe, she’s
not coming home again.