Plathitudes

Goodbye is an echo which never fades. 

It hangs, reverberating, off canyon walls of grief. 

Words ill-chosen and clumsy, a distraction from the warm greeting which was life.

They’re shades, wraiths and mists drifting over the graves of the dead, blending and folding into themselves in a constant drift. 

Light retreats from them and the darkness consumes them.

What can be said of this absurdity we call life? 

That it can be a consummation of humour and love and that it consists of nothing at all. 

A legacy written in invisible ink; 

A vapour.

Nothing survives the analysis of the living, flawed with hope, fear and optimism. 

The contents of a beast’s belly cannot criticise that which consumed it. 

A butterfly’s wings blown free of colour, rendered translucent flightless. 

The echo of a doorbell in an empty house.

In the light the creatures are cornered in shadows, but in the dark they slip across the floor, scattering to their nocturnal pursuits.

A clock chimes, but nobody hears, and so it chimes again. 

A tar-coloured bird giggles in the darkness and then yells as if it is day.

But it isn’t.

A copper bowl sings with the strokes of a leather mallet.

Goodbye is an echo which never fades,

Goodbye is an echo which never fades,

Goodbye is an echo which fades, fades, fades.

There’s memory held in shades, shades, shades.

Death is the negative snap of life.

Life, inverted.