THE END

 

That’s a body in that coffin

He’s gone

We will never see him again

Never talk to him

But there are a lot of things not in that coffin

His smile

His crazy laugh

A twinkle

His perceptive intelligence

That could penetrate walls

His barbed wit

His craziness

His individuality

Warmth

And madness

He was an irascible old bastard

An awkward old sod

An impetuous madman who knew no boundaries

He hurt people

And we loved him

He loved people

And we hurt him

He was a confused wonderer

A thoughtful targeter

A gleeful commentator

A worried madman

A poet, musician, father and a man

His poems, his music and his thoughts are not in that coffin.

He’s left them back here with us.

He is alive in our memories.

He goes on and on forever through the ripples we all pass along

The bastard touched us

And moved the world.

Miss Him?  It will be hard to live without him. But only part of him has gone.

Opher 12.1.02

I wrote this for a friend

Our lives are much too short. We only just get going and it is over.

Every friend gone leaves a hole.

All we leave are the ripples of our wake. They spread out endlessly to touch everyone, passing from one to another in an endless chain, like snooker balls, our ripples bounce off each other.

We may not touch others directly but we nudge and prod through others.

Friends are gone but they live on in our thoughts, our memories and the effect they had on us. They change us. We change each other.

Together we build a zeitgeist that changes the world.

I wrote this poem for a dear friend who is now a series of ripples that are resounding around this globe. I miss him. But I still feel him talking to me in my head. I take out my memories and dust them off. He still teaches me. He has left so much of himself behind for us.

It is wrong that he is gone, it makes me angry, but his ripples will live on for ever.