I cannot feel my pulse under the skin

and my breathing

at times too erratic, too shallow,

unkempt

and barely noticeable, only captured in the smoked over

glass as the whisper of exhalation or in the stagnated

overthrow of winter’s icy breath

that makes me want to remember images

of my childhood with a chocolate cigarette, two fingers

up to the corner of my mouth as if I

was recreating a scene

from a film noir

and I was the gumshoe solving

my own imminent demise.

 

The sound of the

tick

between the

tock

is loud and clear,

so perhaps I’m not dead yet, just merely resting

and the chest pains I feel are more to do with anxiety,

for why would the rag and bone man

herald his arrival

when he can just sneak up from behind and take you

without a single thought or spark of misbegotten

conscious standing in his way,

the last sound as The Who ask who you were

and the stoned offer no eternal peace.

 

Live each day as if it’s your last

was a motto handed down to me

by a man dressed in black on the top deck of the

number 45 bus, for the rag and bone man

makes no deals with the bored.

I never saw him get off the bus

and my mother, deep in conversation with

the parson’s wife never saw him at all.

I have packed much in and yet I fear that

my deal with the rag and bone man was struck that day,

stop for a minute, linger too long between the

tick and the tock and I will come for you,

do not rest except for fitful sleep and then dream of me,

for I already have your pulse marking out Time.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015