Poem: "You Upset The Grace Of Living"

YOU UPSET THE GRACE 

OF LIVING WHEN YOU LIE: 

LETTERS THE DEAD DISPATCH 

‘the singing of the song 

sustained an echo of the life…’ 

 (Tim Hardin 1940 – 1980)

 

you say 

you hear voices 

in your head, 

and that 

one of them, is mine… 

but if poems 

encrypt the lives 

of the poet 

& we write to 

retrieve and revise 

 our self-deceptions 

of the past… 

if memory, 

and the things that 

memory retains, 

are the way we 

make sense of love 

it seems 

this poem I’m writing 

is all about the you 

I hear in my head, 

a poem of that past, 

and the promises 

we failed to keep 

perhaps 

if we listen together, 

the voices we hear 

might help us invent 

new futures