ABNEY PARK

We met among the dead
stomping cigarette ends into earth,
moist and bleached by summer’s past warmth
and now, the chill of gritty tombs and twisted steel
are a foundation for a drama,
with scenes of birth
death and kitchensink
liebestraum.

I unlatch secrets,
words bolted together to form meaning
amids meaningless ritual.
I get coffee. It is cold.
Cold as grave ground death talk
where love was a cue
onto some dark stage
with trees bare and chaste
shedding insecurities
with dour leaves and soiling memory.

Here among the stone angels,
kneeling in prayer my soul fattens
like an ivory Buddah until
the ivy chokes and swallows them
to be lost forever in peace, fragments
in a chain, linking my death
with our common desire for
myth and understanding.

Abney Park. Hackney, London. 1990