Eyes bulging
Nose flaring – dripping
Ears thick and blocked
Bones frail and weak
...
I am sorry, mother, that in those lowly morning hours
It should be you who stumbled upon me in that chair,
With your debt to pay, pills to swallow – there - my towers
To behold, ransacked, razed, beyond self-repair.
...
In an abyss of some description:
An adolescent – with a pencil – dressed as if for a funeral – observes all God’s playgrounds from behind a broken pair of rose-tinted glasses.
In a pub:
...
The Rose
that grew from the cigarette bud
flew
from fingertips to die in mud
...
When the view of your love is reviewed by distance
And your place at the altar displaced by time;
When love’s woods echo with plaintive insistence
Yet your trees still topple, all in line.
...
Grow faster – now – as we fall,
And – boldly – bleach our bones with dye
That pride colour beauty where we withdraw.
...
When I, my brother’s beauty, did adopt,
Retraced, back at the first smooth glass did I stand,
And the flaws of my unloved face had I forgot.
But in this new reflection did I then spot,
...
Where they gracefully land in old age
At the foot of a growing mountain
With their crooked stick between their two crooked legs
And sullen eyes pinned toward a changing soil
...