Write a funeral poem

Write a funeral poem

This was the instruction ringing in my ears as I watched the sea take on shades of subtle green. A sea seen against an overgrown thistle with purple-spiked heads. I turned to see who had triggered the initial instruction, but in the dying light, all I could make out was a dark shape that slouched off in the direction of my own home. And this fact seemed to liberate me to walk further, even during approaching night, down to the sea where the sounds of breeze were part of the changing shades of colour working their own language for me in the direction of the poem that had been required. Not so much seeing readable words but more seeing the aforementioned shades moving across a blank page — or were they moving across a translucent layer of attenuating skin?

I spoke to myself as if I were a different person, and that person spoke back to me who thought me equally different from him. Or should it have been equally different TO him? I never knew what the rule was. Being a poem, it did not seem to matter. Poetry was created so as to break rules of expressing thoughts and make them as if they had never been expressed before. The sea seemed to agree as it lost its latest colour to the darkness. I was now much nearer the sea, so it was hard to see it as a sea at all, having become a strange fluid slushing at my feet. Its shingly undertow articulating…

He was born to write this,
He was born to write that.
Each word to hit or miss,
Dots making commas flat.

You know I know you know
The moments getting slow
Punctuation flown
Rhyme and reason blown

Into the shades of tide
Into a night so wide
A slow swish of time
A misrule of rhyme

You did not hear it
You did not fear it
As you at least reached home
With his fine final poem