And I am sliding down the hard wall of your message
it is Christmas Day my seventy years felled
the foundling rings of life spiral slipping the cortex
a speeding ticket from a front on with the floor
Wasn’t it only yesterday we pasted words?
Their faint blossom still colours the keyboard
I tried to promise Castlemaine sometime the next week
a half dozen broken shells of days overtook us
but you know you’ve called out my gypsy blood before
the unearthed wire in the lyric of the perishing fray
a fraught hesitation in the pause lapsed for reach
Now this Great White of absence pulls all down
a mean jagged grip to calcify the present verses
gasping in the breaks to surface ventricles ashore
our delinquent breath in the stanzas of your lost smile
And I am sliding down the hard wall of your message
Rob messaged me on Christmas Day 2023, and then was gone very quickly.
His last message on Boxing Day was still cheerful, full of his innate love for words and what seemed a peace with the situation. He loved his poet friends, books, and … that space between the things we think we know and the gentle smile which says we don’t. Pete Spence put out our poems in a memorial section for Rob in the issue of NO PLACEBOS 7 compiled and with an introduction from Andy Jackson.
James Walton Poetry 