Heavy Coin
In honour of National Poetry Day, here’s a poem from Tesserae, my collection of poems. Feel free to buy it!
HEAVY COIN
Make sense, make haste, make love.
Make a statue of your soul and fill it with dust and treacle,
A genuine thing of slip and slop, sticking and stuck.
Make a map of a nearby kingdom and touch it with flint.
Make honey from the flowers that bloom in your mind, Agonizing traces of who you used to be.
Now come, solemnly gather close,
Walk to the shores of the grey, and sip the limpid brew.
Forgive yourself your sins, forget your loves, those you conquered, those who vanquished you.
Now you are empty, a thing without spirit, spirit without soul.
You have no matter, no memory, no past.
Your wife of 40 years, your children blend into the sand and disappear from your heart.
Thoughtless, emotionless, useless you stand, awaiting the creek, the splash, the waft of the bark.
Through the lethargic mist it comes, a dark hulled ferry, gliding towards you.
Make ready to pay the man,
Heavy coin, heavy coin.
Make ready to release the life, Heavy coin, heavy coin.
Pale hand, dark hood, planks shrinking with the power of age.
Step aboard, you who were a man, a husband, a father, a friend.
Step aboard and pay for your existence,
Heavy coin, heavy coin.
Empty, closed, the echo of sadness drips from every cloud,
You drift through the mist to an unseen shore.
You have lived, you have loved, you have been a man.
You have struggled, you have worked, you have tried to understand the pastures of the world.
And now you rest, embalmed in tepid memory,
Waiting for your new time, your new existence.
For you have paid the ferryman,
Heavy coin, heavy coin.
You have made your statue and watched it sink beneath the waters of your soul.
Hominid 