Challenge

Here, have a pure night tear but also
a horn-blowed snotty tissue. Here
here here in the dark when truth comes killing
and every bit of heart has swelled and risen
out of the ribs to meet it.

I won't wake my partner. That would be two people
suffering instead of one. I'm sliding
down the slide (natch) of desperation
from a sweet uplifting song, sweet communion
of a kiss, The Kiss, written and wrung out of
and sung by a young woman with a shining flood
of hair, and she sings in 1973 and by 1979
she is dead of a drug overdose, and in this night
it makes absolute sense: shine and sing
with intolerable sweetness and then snuff out,
because life isn't like that. You can't really bear it.

They say be your authentic true self,
as if you'd survive. Oh, in the morning I'll be OK,
OK for another day, and that scares me. Help.
I'm lost, like everybody else.

That list of all the things that have touched our lives
like bits of music and art and people and animals
and the agonising kindnesses that make us feel again
- the arm round the shoulder, the offer of a jacket
when I'm cold, though he isn't even trying to get sex
- we're just watching meteor showers.
Hear the sad nova's dying cry, as the song says.

It all means we keep living, though I first typed leaving.
The joys, connections, and most of all the narratives,
give us a terrible hope in life and we can't betray it,
despite the slump and pain and then the irony
of the comfortable bed with the blue linen we chose.

Kyrie Eleison. My tears have annoyed the pillow.
Caring is too much, and some voices are too sweet.
Blowing my nose is ugly. There could be silver light
and softness against the darkness. Come on then,
come on, light. Come and have a go, if you think
I'm hard enough.

(This poem was written after I heard The Old Grey Whistle Test performance of Judee Sill's The Kiss.)