Never Missed, Always Dead
My sister is dead, at the age of eighty-seven
I don’t miss her,
yet in a perverse way it still feels empty (for a little while)
She was empty like Italo Calvino’s non-existent knight;
I was afraid of her as a child
She was, all her life, cold as a fish;
she tried to act human,
but was an alien from outer space
She never quite managed to imitate
a living person’s empathy and warmth,
which she never understood
She tried, like Alan Turing, to crack the code,
but failed spectacularly
She was always dangerously dead;
tumbling through life
as something unwanted, something hollow & desolate
behind a false smile
And now she is dead, a lifelong failed attempt later
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
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Written on 2025-10-24 at 21:05
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Lawrence Beck |
