POEM - The Passing Places

And, as is usual I reach out

I reach over

with the need to know

a need to believe 

to sense

that you are there

it is more than a comfort

more than a palliative to chaos

more important 

than an idle gesture, but an emotion 

the hands are but a flicker of,

a burnishing of the heart's

yearning to not feel alone

an aloneness 

prefigured in the etching

of a body into space

that is a life, my life

and within reach of it

is you, innumerable moments

of another body outside my own

another soul, traveling packed with 

the divisions of our solitude shared

along the traverse

of country roads, narrow as a badger run

with scraped out lay-bys, these arcs 

of passing places, 

then stopping places, 

those places that move me, move you,

that enliven me, that I love, 

that love me back, places painted

with reassuring faces,

places where I rest easier

places where being is not a grind,

an effort not to fall over

into negative spirals, for our time together

has this amorphous diaphanous quality

of appearing to effortlessly pass 

unnoticed, the space
where a ghost should be, but isn't,

cos there you are, alongside the catalogues 

of despondency, when we fly

catapulted back into love

then, I can cheer only you and I on

and on and on, until an imagined point
where the road ahead runs out, or
drives into an eternal passing place

where I lose my grasp of you, and you of I

reaching over with a hand for morning comfort,
an impulse barely awake,  

saying out of the dark 

are you there?
and feeling nothing but cold creases 

on an empty bed, 

perhaps

gone to the bathroom for a pee,

perhaps 

seeking comforts for insomnia,

underpin
these quiet rehearsals of incipient alarm, 

of grief nascent, a waiting place

in which to discover 

how temporary or not, your absence will be, 

til I hear a distant chuckle, your

in the room below

something is amusing you

whilst scrolling through Reddit, and I

cease interrogating the vaults of heaven.

Written November/December 2023

by Stephen Lumb