There was no single moment of goodbye

Just a tapdance of last times

Each blissfully, beautifully unaware

That they were the last of their kind.

I did not want you to end in pain

But that is cancer

And endings do not rhyme.

They are balancing acts

Between consciousness and analgesia

Stutters in metre

And broken poesy.  

There is no paeon I can write to you

That tempers the edges of absence.

My dreams stage reenactments of last times,

Which now proclaim their own demise

And knowย by heart the epilogue.

We keep forging clockwise 

Further away from what you knew.

The lines of your life have fallen out of verse

Your marks grown sparse

And the balance now shifts

Between holding close

And letting go.

I do not know

How the strange, metaphysical anatomy of thingsย 

Allows for you to cease.

But – I come to realise –

Parsing the universe between old and new

There is an alchemy of being that I bear forward

Disordered, but still perhaps true.

In the margins 

Between the lines

There are alloys of you.