Can the living grieve for their lives?

Can the living grieve for their lives?
A forgotten door now firmly shut

Suddenly your skies have limits

Worn from walking this far

Halt

Curtain call

You are not invincible
We are not forever
Not everything is possible

The fragility of opportunity, it trembles at the touch

A fairy’s wing against a window pane
Breathtaking to catch, a treasure to attain
Compare it to banality
The sprinkling dust of hope
- it makes you sneeze
Shut your eyes
Your nose is raw

Gleaming gold
Glowing fists
Smooth
Streamlined
Success
Phelps beat his own record
All at once
You are your only competitor

Now or never
Else in the future
Which is really just as bad

Milestones to reach, mountains to climb
Jagged rock leads to open knees, spilling freely down the sides

Stand at the top in front ahead

Your guts in a squishy heap
Swimming in the waters below
If you’re lucky
It could have been your soul
Extinguished by your very own roughened palm crushed between calloused finger tips
In exchange for weathered stone smooth as success heaving you to the top

What do we do after we seek and we find and succeed? Seek the ultimate, the endless, the internal, the impossible

Thoughts are leaping into my head,
Landing badly like car crash victims
Smashed and squelched and slapped against my skull
Seeping badly. Seeping fast.

‘til I cannot read, they are no longer there and I have only the sense of an elusive truth missed
A message never conveyed or even processed

Vivid
Vibrant

You bathe in it, hide in it, sink into it with no explanations
Embrace by day or postpone it
They are rich in quality
Sometimes

The multicoloured glory of an array of fireworks
The flickering transformation of a black and white TV
They can lick your wounds, soothe your ego, feed your desire, drive you to the foot and fly over that mountain, sacrificing nothing, beholden to none

Or leave you shrunken, Old Mad Broken
Rocking in a chair. Sitting on the floor.
Stooped in despair.
Bottles are your friends. Rain that old enemy.
The bed a sinister comfort
The outside a needless truth

Jingling of money. Clank of an award. Smear of a sticky kiss. Beam of a secret smile.

Dancing alone. Bowing amidst applause.
In a darkened room, the truth is nought but yours

Yellow. Yellow. Yellow.

Yellow-Gold
Goldy-Yellow
Gold
Yellowy-Gold
Yellowy-Green

Green. Green. Green.

Sticky-Green
Sickly-Green
Bitter-Green

Lone. Lone. Lone.

Suddenly I loathe everyone.
You too.

I am

I am.

I am the mother who raised me

I am the philosophy that shaped me

I am Jesus who taught me to love

I am my sister who believes in me

I am my father who doesn’t like me and does not care

I am the friends whose lives have taught me how not to live

I am the insecurity that eats me from within

I am the vanity with fragile foundations

I am the arrogance that got me far, won me respect, made me work hard and made me enemies

I am the Italy 03, New York 04, Israel 06, Nigeria 07, Paris 08

I am all the teachers who thought I was wasting my potential

I am everyone who did not think I would get this far

I am the tsunami victims, the 9/11 victims – and when I say victims I mean survivors

I am the individualists also known as the conservatives who care only about themselves and their profits

I am Albert Camus who taught me the hypocrisy of man

I am Barack Obama who replaced my anti-American scepticism with hope

I am Professor Tsu who taught me that even freedom is dictated

I am the Jericho sand that redefined the word “hot” and stressed the importance of sandals

I am Jay Gatsby, believer in all that is idealistic and unrealistic

I am the Big Issue seller who thanks me in an Old Etonian voice

I am the academic structure that I loathe

I am the idiots in Plato’s Cave who refused to believe just because they had not seen

I am every eighteen year old named Victoria in England

I am the male affable directionless protagonists in Haruki Murakami’s novels

I am the hope that drives me towards the light and away from the noose

I am the dream world that I live in

I am the dawn that I like to watch breaking

I am the full moon that sends chills and awe down my spine and into my heart

I am the cynicism through which I view the world

I am… still here