This poem explores the feelings one may experience when facing death through three questions: "What must it feel like?" It suggests death is both mundane and unbearable, equalizing all living things. While not how one plans to die, death comes with longing, regret, and exposed vulnerabilities. The poem separates these musings with a reference to Narcissus neglecting his wife as he became consumed with his own reflection, leading her to notice signs of aging in herself.

3. This Is A Poem
b/w
A Violation Of Expectation
Mairi Campbell-Jack
Burning Eye

4. Copyright © 2012 Mairi Campbell-Jack
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of
this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior written consent of the
author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This edition published by Burning Eye Books 2012
www.burningeye.co.uk
@burningeye
ISBN 978 1 90913 605 2
Printed in Scotland by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

5. This Is A Poem
In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported
paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed
themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever
expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their
ripped-out arms and legs, with
"This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick.
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

6. -ed
What must it feel like?
To notice,
last breaths slipping
from your mouth.
Blood
slowing on its circular route.
A destination never to be met.
How does it hurt?
In a thousand tiny different ways.
In your memories,
your past,
that future you will never taste
which tantalises
with a promise of effervescence.
What must it feel like?
Unbearable
and mundane.
An inescapable individual
act.
Equalising and repeated
from the molten birth
of the world.
From plant, to mouse, to king to god.
A fact, like birth, like pain.
Remarkable and terrible.
The ever opening mouth,
salivating for the swallow,
waiting to consume
the little we have collected and
come to understand.

7. The mysteries kept in hearts,
occasionally fingered.
What it must feel like.
Not the way it was planned.
Not peaceful with sentiment.
Not bulging with meaning.
Not neat and without piss
and stretched dry skin and
longing and regret.
What secret we can never share.
What heartbeat,
pounding
pounding
pounding.

8. A Violation Of Expectation
Separation: n 1. The act or an instance of separating; the state of being
separated. 2. (in full judicial separation or legal separation) an
arrangement by which a husband and wife remain married but live
apart. 3. A final acknowledgement of the gulf that has grown between
you. 4. A ripping of skins that were once kitted together. 5. A sadness.

9. Narcissus had a wife you know…
she would arrange his hair
while he gazed, clipping it
to perfectly frame his face
as his looking deepens his love.
She would drape his cloak
on him when it was cold,
at times pointing out features
he may have missed in his contemplation.
One day, catching her own reflection
she noticed a sagging round her jaw,
a line by her eyes. Looking down she saw
her hands, in his cloak, looked more like her mother's.
After that his hair grew,
and threatened to cover his eyes.
Dissolution: n 1. disintegration; decomposition. 2. (usu. foll. by of) the
undoing or relaxing of a bond, esp. of: a. marriage. b. a partnership. c.
an alliance. 3 Like the gradual dissolving of salt in water, the only
thing remaining is the taste.