last man out of eden

Petals

I was told yesterday that a former colleague took her life shortly before Christmas. We weren’t very close friends, but we were certainly friends, and close enough to have been out drinking more than several times. This is an old poem of mine, but posted here for the first time, and for her.

And a reflection, because we always wonder at times like this what we could have said, or whether we could have made it clearer that we would have listened: make sure everyone you work with, however senior or junior to you they may be, knows that, if there’s no one else, they can talk to you without fear of judgment. Be an open person, and if that’s considered a weakness where you work, then do anything, however small, to change the workspace around you.

RIP Emma

Petals

Pieces of broken bodies fall around me

Like funeral petals

Fallout from friendships

Faced with the nuclear option of my madness.

I gouge through gobs of flesh

That were once lips, dribbling easy promises,

Scouring for something so solid

As a splinter of bone to support my soul.

I laughed and you loved it,

And then I laughed too much and in the wrong places –