Artificial respiration

People come and go.

He felt unstable;

neither here nor there

and she was always somewhere else.

He could remember only

the great dark ponds of her eyes

in the last love poem he wrote for her.

He never spoke much

and when he spoke at all he was rarely heard

(there was, he thought,

some significance in that).

He could only remember her eyes.

The bridge spanned cold,

its icy parapet clung to his feet,

the forecast gave no hope for tomorrow.

He decided it was not for him.

They dragged the bed of the river

and amongst the clinging weeds,

encrusted curios and sleeping wrecks

they found his sunken heart discarded.

There was no beat.

—0O0—