Passing Phase

Agreed, it wasn’t a spur needed to 
goad indolence humoured for this 
abating inferno - but it succeeded 

There’d been no unbridled or free-
ranging intimacies tying emotional 
primacy all week, then my mobile

phone - with gaucheries of Charlie 
Chaplinesque theatrics, dives into 
the spa and dramatically expires 

Gasping and wheezing, mimicking 
worse scenes imaginable from any 
French revolutionary torture scene 

And we fall for it, an act analogous, 
a hook & line sequence where fact 
corrodes in psychogenic creativity 

That wins in the end; ‘replace me’ 
is its last blank-screen gasp fading 
into oblivion’s funereal blankness 

Then death’s loneliness - a pause 
in passing, an acceptance ending 
this benign phase of its mateship 

© 3 March 2014, I. D. Carswell