She had always wanted to let go,
to feel the fading of her tired heart,
lie down and just accept the inevitable.
Some called it an unhealthy obsession
to think about mortality regularly,
but she accepted the fact and she was happy,
under no delusions that she would live forever.
Just.
Let.
Go.
Three words that could devastate a mind.

She philosophised about the beyond,
contemplated an afterlife or nothing.
There seemed to have been no beforelife
that she or anyone else could recall,
so what chance was there of something after?
Life wasn’t a circle, it was a spiral,
and we were always spiralling down,
and when we reached the bottom,
well, you slide right off the end into non-existence.
No fanfare of trumpets, no felicitating light,
just the cold termination of time.

Her spiral was shorter than it should have been,
some cosmic joke that always gets played
on the smart and not the dumb.
This universe doesn’t seem to do balance,
more stupid people than clever,
more dark matter than physical,
more space out there and not enough here.
So the universe had to set her free
and not a day goes by I don’t miss her.
I asked her where I was on my spiral
but she never gave me an answer,
instead, a little look of knowing
that could never be read.

I hope she was wrong
and she waits at the foot of my spiral
to catch me when I slip and slide away.

We’re blind to any possible pain to come,
punch-drunk on the intoxicating words of love,
an entire lexicon reserved for a slice of life,
a new language that must be learned and studied.
Love is a passion that must be suffered,
tiptoeing over broken glass to find a clear island
where all your dreams are waiting to come true.

Some people are lucky and find what they seek,
others choke on the herring bone when they try to speak,
but love is a drug and it must be taken with precaution,
there are too many side-effects to ignore the overdose.
Don’t fall in love with a pair of blue eyes,
don’t fall in love with a cup- or dress-size,
fall in love with a person because they mean something,
a personality that produces flowers from your dark well.

The most beautiful part of a person is their mind,
how they perceive the world about them to be,
how they see themselves, not as a person,
but as a living entity who can breathe a universe into being.
Fall in love with that, not an image or a genie’s wish.
Love is not something that can be taught in a classroom,
it must be experienced, for better or worse,
and if love knocks you down and you find yourself in the dirt,
pick yourself up and **** well have another go.

Love doesn’t **** you when you get rejected,
love kills you when you don’t even bother to try.

These used to be windows that kept the cold out,
that frosted over and made the harsh winters translucent.
Now they are nothing but the staring eyes of the dead,
offering the hope of a view but there’s no one behind them,
no child blowing breath on the glass and creating new shapes,
one pane now smashed and if neglect needs something to be broken.
The lives of so many fractured minds found their fate here,
it’s little wonder the ghosts don’t walk down the hallways,
there’s nothing to see but the decay of unreliable paint,
nothing to hear but the silence a building like this once craved.
The dead do not dwell here, the darkness is too empty,
the beds are empty and echoing footsteps do not pass the doors.
So much sacrifice went into the destruction of every dream
that even the living find the atmosphere repulsive and vile,
that even in its history, this building wails like its occupants
once did when the typhoid was bad and the madness set in.
A grave without a body, the loneliest place in the world.