"Fly away, my soul ...

Dear me, dear me ... I meant to do this chronologically but occasionally get it wrong. Here's something I wrote to the same guy a few months earlier. I think it was when he went off to Coorg to try and get off the smack and straighten his life out.

Fly away, my soul
I can't hold you back any longer.
Go and look for the sun.

But if you get tired of searching
come back to the warmth of my arms.
Just let me know when you're coming back
so I can shed my armour.
(Written on October 17, 1985)

What I like about it is the way I expressed feeling exposed and vulnerable without him, having to armour myself in order to survive without him. (And we think this is "love"?!)

A few months later I wrote another version of this poem, by which time I was, like him, badly hooked on smack, and I think I (or perhaps we) had begun to realise that our love affair was a threesome - him, me, smack - and that our being together only pulled us down further.

Fly away, my soul
We can't be one any longer.
It's time we looked for the sun.
And when we've found what we're looking for
come back to the warmth of my arms.
Just let me know when you're coming back,
so I can shed my armour.
(written on 22.3.86)