All Tomorrows

  we beg your pardon, but this new year's eve we'll be gone in our cave underneath the etherdown as our bed rocks down time across falls & eddies & tidepools & swifts

  across our abysses of time - yours mine his hers  - we dance stumble rise fight dance mourning sunrise morning as the vastness of the past flows seamlessly into here – none of our learnings wasted love is all we can give & nothing is wasted. ours

  my limbs twist gently into new configurations fur begins to spread my head shifts into a more efficient angle a forward drift of stance in the amniotic fluid of my cocoon taut like a spring: the membrane cracks the transformation will be complete soon I'm ready to speak

  hello, world.

  a million months ago she died and kicked me in the solar plexus kicking off a twister twisting my body and limbs and face into an eightball of grief that rolled off, automaton, spinned me into a black whole until I caved in. unknowing. I collapsed into nothing-at-all. my aching arms heaving me out now. hello world. the chemistry of love is the chemistry of grief is the nullity of chemistry. implosion. end. explosion. world. outward.

  you jumped in the river and joined me, you sailed the house with me through stormy rapids the bracken waters of the desert navigated the maze of the jungle canals plunged headlong down the falls of darkness till all was upside down and shattered to pieces and I but a car-wreck I have crossed the river so here I lie panting next to you. the pain is over, the far bank of the river is the far bank now: I can see the hole where the foundation was. I loved her. our three sweet daughters, so much alike, have moored the house to the river bank: let’s tow it up on dry land, let’s build the new foundations. I am ready. but right now, I am panting with exhaustion. let me look at you. good morning, my love.

every tear and reminiscence a measure of the depth of narcisism for there is no afterlife and no god either except love which can only be real

it comes down at last like a storm of stones three years' worth of tears and fears and pain buckets-full of years grave-day loads of bones all is new & now, all old & then the bed the same but we're li'll nemo here with my unknown past on your tender shoulders you make me fly on up into us

  the reboot the reset almost complete, we stand in her his my your shoes overlooking this brandnew world of mountains and rivers, of plains and woods where the future will happen where the future we shape does it hurt to let go a whole former land, a whole former time? you can't restart without losing the past you can't restart without embracing death so let us into dive into the open air off we go

it all reverts back to before you: my belongings dropping away from me like unsympathetic skydivers, gone the car house job life none of it mine to start with so as senility grimaces at me on the horizon, I reboot to adolescence, nothing to give but my bare skin full-on reboot

  beyond the obliteration of a lifetime lies the annihilation of dreamtime understanding how to love beyond memories, pictures and words I am grateful you came packed with a whole life to live in you’re making it so easy to love you

  a year ago today was the first day that you were not you will never be again. so against all odds I planted my life number two and the river runs deep

out into the open savannah. fear not. sing: I love to love. all of you. the past happened.

all anchors and tow-ropes severed - not all of them painlessly, more so for them than for us - but the river is calling us and so we drift into the future with a houseful of memories and love for sustenance into a brandnew land

the crisp spring light floods your stonecold grave where the first freesias of the new year bud under your sun that we’ve circled once since the end of the past. the circle is complete. this is it then, the final cut two wedding rings discarded the past shut off, with all the people in it and all the things that were left undone and left unsaid - flushed away in a flood of tears. I loved you, my sun, but my soul’s grown back, and I travel without you now onward onto an open ocean in a new solar system