Once you had gone
I began to clean your kitchen.

I had not meant to do so much
But once I’d started
kept unearthing
New stains, each of which gripped me.
How pathetic it seemed. My humble,
mortifying gesture.
The battle engaged, on hands and knees
To wash the place your feet had been.

This greasy hurdle had been your endless pause.
It meant something to you: an infinite wall
Of struggles which left
You stranded, dangling in
The water

Which forced your murky surface to gleam. My hands were
Dressed in it, fattened by it.

Undeniably captured by what these pale reflections
Had witnessed: the drink, the sudden loss of appetite.

Whose face was this?
Which soap-fuelled wishes
loomed childish
In your dishes?

I scoured it, nonetheless
It pulsed beside me: the question

To which all dusty cracks were the dissipated answer.

What had I hoped to achieve? And had I hoped,
Gallant with dirt-driven nails,
To uncover the tangled sheets beneath your hair,  
And unpick each strand of hurt which slept there?

I had tried to puncture
The coffin you writhed in
With a pinprick, a shard of light
Which barely touched your eyes.

She was there, too, somehow
Muddled up in all of this.
Your common condition, my ignorance
Had merged you, standing dormant
In the doorway. Monochrome eyes
Surveyed my efforts:
The half-hearted floor
And clumsily put-away
Containers.

But yours was a tap, a flowing illness.
The underground system of pipes was endless.
The water-source bled unhappiness
Which ran and kept on running.

I rubbed until it became transparent,
The whole room shouted I wish you better.

The sudden exposure of worktops without texture,
The naked magnifying-effect of moisture. I would wrench
The entire flat from its iron slumber, cleaved to the hour,
The minute in which
The mask of your mortality slipped.

Just once.

Enough to cause an eternal stillness. Squalor kept like a shrine.
What you had been and could yet become. Dust.

For whilst it remained you could not be shaken,
Shivering in the fresh momentum of waking, you could not be shaken
Out of a top-floor window, you could not shed
the weight of the sheets which held you
Pinned to your bed.

It shook in the wind, a brilliant, cold sunlight
Showering indifferent streets. Boneless body hung
To drain itself. Tablet-white.
Stains dried on like memories. No longer
Afraid of heights

I draped you, swinging
In and out of life.