All of us must wade through ghosts
As we navigate our lives
Thigh high through the thunderous breakers
Almost pulled under by the tides
Up to our knees fording the swamps
Over our boots in sucking marshes
Soaking our socks with freezing splashes
From milky puddles in the grass
The ghosts now trail behind like cobwebs,
Then bridal trains, frayed in our wakes,
These memories of vague acquaintance
Lovers, mothers, teachers, mates,
Who snag like ivy round your ankles
Or billow up in puffs of dust
And sting your eyes like pollen downpours
Then wind you with the endless loss
They’re just our atmospheric pressure,
These ghosts of everyone we’ve known
And if you Muybridge any of us
Capture each instant on its own
Then restart Time, you’ll millipede us
To weave endlessly through the mist,
Plaited with their ectoplasm,
Congalining with our ghosts.
Because, whichever way we grieve them
And euphemise they’re lost or passed
The truth is we can never lose them
Because they’ll haunt us to the last
Tugging each spare spur of memory
In our head’s mad Brownian Motion
Scuffing at our hearts like emery
Tossed upon the ghostly ocean.