Her liver took her life -
A viscous noun for a vital organ.
Now the pun plays on my mind,
Performing word-association -
Each word leads to the next,
My head now led by homonyms
Like dropped lead is by gravity.
A fermented apple fallen from the tree
Of knowledge made me a sinful insider
In someone else’s cider business.
But as tasteless as word-play may be,
Like lager, bitter,
I can’t just leave my grief
In the larder, bottled up.
She learned it harder: cans and bottles
Always topple, bottoms-up.
I know it won’t be easy,
Won’t open up Pandora’s bar
Expecting to see jewellry
Akin to the pin-broach she once wore
To re-approach her husband, lost in war.
It was his livery she looked at
While she drank to her deliverance.
One organ taken from an organism just leaves -ism.
And where would we be left with solely -isms?
Solipsism?
It was a liquid -ism which drowned her ‘till disorganised,
Shackled inside a prison,
Life refracted through her prism-eyes,
Making light of her night visions
As though total blackout isn’t blinding,
Taking lightness as a given when the ceiling’s
Swirling, world is winding.
But where brightness was,
Dullness danced a waltz
Until keeping counting on the odds
Of her number never being up
Even seemed at odds
With God’s immortal logic.
At least she was at least the age
Where hair declares the brain’s about
To chug along its last long line,
At long last gone
The way of the late steam train:
White wisps. Her head a deadly bleached reef
Where once swam schools
Of thought. She stood, a study
Of complexity - a city in which every complex
Neighboured every other; convex streets;
Cortical clusters of apartments
Where the word ‘apart’ meant nothing,
Where a part bent beyond repair
Could cause each couple to re-pair
And there was so much change in her
We had to shake her like a penny jar
So she could spend what she had left in her
Before the bank was broken,
Assets liquefied,
And the river brimmed behind her eyes
Burst forth a frothing stream
Of consciousness.