Geoffrey

​​​​​​I will not be seeing you,
the rictus on your lips
told me, you
could not bare your temptations:
that suffocating smell of sweat mixed with
prophesies.
I will not be seeing you
recounting history, drinking Guinness,
there will not be the last dance
or last call.
I will not be seeing you
talking about immortality, the Nobel prize,
the Prix Goncourt.
Literature has failed us all.
How could I have known that
you were robust, had courage
and it would evolve into imagination,
sadness.
Or that love had been issued to you,
like an ID or passport to expire.

You stood up
with your Dostoyevskian beard sharing
wonders, pulling up your sleep,
awakening your biceps, your anxious fingers
uncovering the mysteries of Russian literature,
Pushkin,
Gogol,
well known for his biting tongue’s tricks.

I met you as an octogenarian,
I held your arm, cleaned your crumbs
bathed you, fed you with Crème Brûlée

Today I picked up your photographs
I know now that you were a different
man to the one with yellow skin and missing teeth.

Your love for Aimé Césaire,
Franz Fanon
lived in your empty hands
not like angels in your
last days, but as men.

Your Russian hat is gone,
your job as a porter at Sussex County hospital
no longer remembered.
You were an author with so many
printed errors without corrections.
But so much one of us.