Colin F. Jones

A QUINTESSENCE OF SPIRITS

With amative passion I simply adored him
That his old vacant eyes and his aboulia,
All my thoughts of heaven did quietly dim,
And still I shed a tear for him.
I boondoggle in dream and that intended,
Remains undone due to lack of worth,
For the concatenation that I once defended
Seems a rusted waste in trodden earth.
I see myself as his replicated image,
As polygenic disease now discombobulates,
My mind that in youth I could not envisage,
As this Gordian knot that I can’t untie.
I’ll seep into mystery for death to pillage,
For as my father did, I must wither and die.

‘Twas a lachrymose parting and with limpid vision,
I saw a ghost there forming that looked like me.
Not a nefarious distortion or angelic apparition
Just a wasted old man losing his dignity.
No celestial miracles no heavenly enchantments,
Just the bodily remains of a gentle man,
Whom we laid in the grave with the woman he married,
To end where perhaps their happiness began.
Their nirvana is unknown; but they rest there together,
In the soil of the Earth two pulchritudinous lovers,
Who lived for their children through all kinds of weather,
And gave all their joy for the benefit of others…
Wrapped now in the substance of immaculate covers
As a quintessence of spirits that the Lord God recovers.

Submitted for the July 2006 IWVPA Club Theme Project, “Quintessence”