Jon haunts me in bright pulsing waves
Like an early RKO Radio film ident;
Ann haunted me last night, in a cameo in a dream;
Nick, who drowned at his own hotel in Wales,
Snuck in through a brief and callous text
And haunted me for that whole week;
The other Jon, quite long ago, haunted me in the garden
Unappeased by late night monologues and alcohol,
And triggering an abject tic, as I’d look up
Instinctively each time he crossed my mind,
Towards an empty sky;
My father, weeks after he had died, caught my heart on
Charing Cross Road, quite suddenly,
Then sucked out blinked back tears
On trains deep in the rush hour;
Then he and Jos, not even sensed but through their absence,
Fouled half our summer holiday
The week after we’d sold their home
By leaving hints of all of Life’s futility
Lying randomly around my mind;
And my mother’s trod my dreams for over fifty years.
All ghosts cling to their half-lives,
But however kindly, well-meaning or benign,
Just trying to cadge a light, a glance, your life force
Or remembrance,
The ectoplasm still congeals as damp lint,
Slopping in to fill the voids where
Joy and hope have shrunk or melt away,
To clog the soul.
And yet the weirdest shade to haunt me was myself,
When I got back my birth name (though no more)
And the ghost of Who-I-Might-Have-Been
Sat in the car beside me
And followed me morosely round, just on
The brink of palpable, all of that bizarre and long weekend.
Like all the rest, it would have been too cruel beyond enduring
To turn a single one of them away.