Mannequin

This is the 3rd draft of a poem about a friend I lost last year.

Night drapes damp and heavy

  Cold

There is no comfort in the world tonight

 

I last saw you three months ago

As you returned to relive the past one more time

But I was caught up in the present, with work and all

  Couldn’t spare a minute

But then, there’s always a next time

I Thought

 

The place is strange, unfamiliar

All around faces I don’t recognize

Even on people I have known for years

  Nobody is the same

 

Joining the rest I wait in silence

As the black line weaves through the building

The nauseating smell of chemicals

Desperately trying to keep clean the sickness from the air

It’s all fake!

 

The scent of imposter lavender

The synthetic flowers on the tables

Tissue boxes at every turn to wipe off the sadness

The people who meekly smile in their mask of cosmetics

  Pretending to be strong

 

Voices call out from the podium at the front

Recollections of the past

A relative, a friend, another unknown voice

Their narratives all congeal into a tragedy that seems,

Much like the smell, a sick trick

 

Then Mrs. Fuller takes her turn

The strong willed mother we shared for a year

Now wilted

Her flames of hair have been dowsed

As she tries to tell her story

Tales of 5^th grade, tales of what seemed a beginning

  But the sobs interrupted

The veil lifts, and the reality hits straight in the gut

And the membrane that has kept me separated breaks

 

  This is real

 

Then around the bend of mourners I see the thing

The tall house of wood that holds what you left behind

The figure of your likeness

Pretending to be you

Wearing your purple stripes and fine platinum hair

But not your smile

The article no one could reproduce

 

It is my turn for farewell

As I stand next to your physical

Untenanted

Eyes closed like a book that never again can be read

Nor can the hands ever again play

Vivaldi’s seasons, or Brahms' Hungarian dances

As you leave the world the voice of your violin follows

Memories flash, audio of your voice in my ear crystal clear

“Nick”

 

My skin goes cold, a shiv through my lungs

And for the first time in years

A tear threatens escape

The room around me begins to melt like candlewax

Then all things become distant and peripheral

I myself strain not to crumble here and now

Friends don’t die!

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this!

 

But the scene is the same

The dark room, the quiet air

The silent friend with stilled lungs

And the weighted night comes back to me

Cold, cold, cold

So young we are, so young you were

Author's Note

There may be some typos I missed, I didn't have a lot of time and I wanted to get this posted. Please note any errors and please make any suggestions you have.

Reviews

[Vishuddha]

This is really hard. Not as hard as X, which I will someday review, but hard because I remember. I have been there, long, long ago and I don't want to remember. But, you have done too good a job. You brought much back. We had no artificial flowers back in those days but even real ones didn't cover the smell. The lights tried to be warm but brought no light, the shadows had no reality. Nothing had meaning. A gray, unshakable, unbreakable nightmare from which there was, and never has been, an awakening. And the colorless dead are cold.

"The room around me begins to melt like candlewax" is an excellent phrase. It is a feeling I had of myself in the interminable days I sat beside a coffin trying to accept my father's death.

I found, beyond death's door, the dead sometimes return once more, in dreams, and yet, it seems, they cannot say a single word, and if a world they say, it is not heard. Their thoughts go with them to the grave. Their emotions stay to haunt ours. We do not want to let them go and yet, would you call them back?

"And the weighted night comes back to me" seems weak for the ending as the rest is stronger. I suppose you write of heavy darkness but it is too compact. I expected a dirge with shades of inescapable finality. Echoes of unrelenting disbelief and forced acceptance. A layer of transparent cold ... something more gripping ... Maybe, something about where are you now? since you are writing to the one gone - which I like.

Last line, good ... (only the good die young) ... Too young? Too young? Death does not care. Everyone dies.

In my case my father was 33, the age of Alexander the Great, the age of the crucified Christ, 3 years younger than Mozart or Byron. He had his reasons, about which I knew little, some very valid. I was only 11. I did not yet write but, death does push you to the edge as I suppose Poe illustrated to you.