When you see that I have died,
when you look into that place
where my odd, quirky connections
once melded luminous and
found resonant red splendour
in heart…and in hearts too

and you see the ashes, chilled,
overlaying stone cold coals,
become grey overcoats
covering what I finally learned
to be so ashamed of?

Scrape those cinders up
shovel and shoe them,
trowel and trough the grits,
find a yearn to place them in,
decorative and strange,
intricate and engraved
and singing,
like me back then…

and carry that vase back
across the silent square,
and toss my ashes high,
yes toss them in the air

Let them fly across the sky
in one last kiss, then wave goodbye,
and falling, floating, snowing what made
me special and vibey…

I will let go gently…and slip away,
away…

Oh…I’m still over there…
where everyone stands, and sips
hot tea and nods so sagely…
I’m in the roundabouts,
just staying in my lane

and signalling (my intentions clear
finally even to the least
of these), signalling easy…
now that I float across
the sky…and drifting, wispy
and fading into sameness
into just like everyone else
everything everywhere else…
fading…just like that.

what was it, that made me…
made me me? Different? ME?

What?  My song?  My sing?
My voluminous preludes?
My silly rhymes, word crimes?
My heart that cries at bird wing flashing
or a dove cooing or a dark look
looming long and loutish?

Alas…the sky awaits,
the sky opens, beckons,
but can’t contain and hold, no.
It’s just Stygian canvas for
a murky ash calligraphy
of unique but too too me.

And now I’m seeing traces,
in smoke and empty vapors
of  ‘trodes and tendrils, shocks that curb,
that cut back hard, that make all things
not new…but same…
and safe…for others but
not for me.

the glitter of dreams,
the flakes of hope,
and the ashes of a heart…
a heart…what…
dripping?

Fire does belly up,
hungry, focused on eating,
fire does purge, does pardon,
and place me there unseen
in the park, soft on the swings,
the teeter totter tamble,
in the quail and quay and quiet
at last…no scramble, still…
and still.

Spread them, fling them, across the sky…
across the aching blue sky.