JIGSAW DAYS

This poem arose from a conversation with someone I vaguely knew. They had, they informed me, stopped drinking sometime before and how they described their situation led me to write this poem.

POEM FOR C

Given the economies

of supermarket squash

and the cheapest of vodkas,

it had always been

how much could he drink,

in the shortest amount of time,

to keep ahead of blacking out,

to avoid the grey dawns

when monochromatic migraine

immobilised him in a space

where he could do nothing

but relive it all over again.

I met him in the fragile truce of sobriety

he called his jigsaw days.

He placed his pieces

into shapes that just might work,

into patterns that had eluded him on the drink.

Some events, he confided, never end,

so you have to find different ways of getting on with it.

It is in my last collection.

Here is Anna Ternheim with an acoustic version of Keep Me In The Dark.

Until next time.