Living Room
This is your space now –
sofas shifted
to accommodate a hospital bed,
tables thick with medication,
drinks and flowers, get-well cards.
I am a visitor, bringing trays,
delivering takeaways,
fetching, carrying,
helping you sit up.
We used to sit together,
my arms around you,
my fingers plaiting your hair
or pressing at your skin,
the cushions placed just so.
Today you pull your hair out
strand by strand, letting it collect
beside you on the bed,
each one a memory, unravelling,
a broken thought.
I watch you from a distance,
two metres feeling like a lifetime,
light years.
Sometimes, when I touch your face,
a kind of warmth connects us.
I feel it in your slight, barely perceptible smile,
imagine it behind your half-closed eyes.
And the living room lights up
with all we were, and are –
its long, slow breaths embracing us
in the space we have left.
Lost World
The earth’s crust is so thin here
that the roads cave in, collapsing
into sinkholes, which they cordon off
or, in the roads, refill with gravel constantly
just to prevent the landscape and the people disappearing.
You would have hated this: a hundred-metre abseil,
and then a trek through rocks, insects and perilous drops,
the only exit a ladder climbing into darkness, chaos, light.
But you’re not here, and so I fall and clamber
for both of us. I imagine your terrified face,
descending into the smoky, otherworldly air,
the rope and harness as the only barriers between
this place and the next, clinging for dear life.
We both make it down,
enjoy the glow worms glistening
like stars on the roof of the cave,
inventing constellations.
But the thirty-metre ladder is the hardest:
wet, muddy rungs and climbing hand by hand,
every ounce of strength in gradual dissipation,
the harness pulling, energising.
I wasn’t brave today, but you were – you put me to shame.
Hanging there, I caught a tiny glimpse of what you felt
staring into oblivion,
your lost world.
David Van-Cauter is a freelance tutor and editor who lives in Hitchin, Herts. These poems are from his commended entry for this year’s IS&T Cafe Writers Pamphlet Commission, “J”. He was runner up in the Poetry Society Stanza competition in October.