A Birthday Poem – Just Another Day

Just Another Day

Today is just a day,
just like any other day,
just like any other time,
could be any other place.

Just another day.

You know this is your day,
and I’m just waiting here,
letting sorrow form and swell,
how hollow is the chest
that dwells?

I am holding onto tears,
beats thinking of the loss,
that I must shoulder on…
there I go,
feeling sorry for myself.
fuck it…

Just another day

No nearby grave for me to wail upon,
I cannot stand on the shore,
near to the dank earth that cocoons your ashes,
not the time to spend that pain,
to let my thoughts suppurate.

Just another day

An age has torn my memories apart,
each moment a thief steals a little more
sucked into a vomit of confusion,
fading to phantoms.

We become jolly fucking spectres,
half remembered dreams or wishes,
lost futures,
regrets that passed.

Just another day

I see you in photographs,
but the heart only knows your touch.

Just another day

In brief moments I see your face,
in the crowd,
your figure,
your gait,
but they are strangers,
it’s a stolen wish.

Just another day

Time passes,
day by day,
things submerge,
aches shrouded in layers,
I think of you,
my life can’t bear the loss,
So I bury you again,
day by day.

Just another day,
could be any other day,
just a birthday.

Notes

My best friend, probably the only person who rivals my wife in terms of how they have utterly changed me passed away last year. She would have been 47 this year. I still miss her. I still have so much to say to her.

Jane loved almost everything I ever wrote. It was a a tradition when i was at college and university that I would write a poem for my friends on their birthdays. Mostly silly stuff (I’m a terrible poet IMOO), but I would write them. People liked them.

I stopped doing it when Leigh wrote one for my birthday that was an epic, and one of my most treasured possessions (now matched by mini-voodoo-woollen me).

This year it came back. Because that’s how I feel. I miss my friend. I think I had one of the greatest platonic love affairs in history. I loved her deeply as a friend, a mentor, a guide and like a child, a sister or a parent. She was all that to me. She was a guiding force of morality, kindness and thought. She utterly changed everyone she touched and I will never stop missing her.

Specific memories fade. But the effect will not.

I miss you Jane. I miss my friend. Happy Birthday.

Rejected Lines

1.

Just another day,
could be any kind of day,
was just your birth day,
(but you had gone away,
you could never stay,
lost into the fray…),

2.

for shits and giggles easy rhymes say living all the fears,

Related Posts:

Doughnut, A Eulogy in Two Parts – Fit The First

Doughnut, A Eulogy in Two Parts – Fit the Second

Ere I am J.H.

 

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1 Response

  1. John Haggerstonr says:

    Thank you for this Mark. It’s absolutely beautiful particularly your Notes
    It had me in tears. I miss Janey so much that every day I can’t stop thinking about her and what a lovely person she was. How blessed I was to have such a woderful person as my daughter. x

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