jerryb

[All your words]

The day you had died, I found
An open door

To your sanctuary.

All your words…
Those inestimably brilliant portraits
Your rooms, deep in wood smoke and oiled leather
Those books, dusty windows onto other people’s worlds.
Even the worn carpet where your feet would wait anxiously,
fidgetty as mice, fretfully exploring other outcomes.

Your world was formed, as you were, by what others wanted to
say.

You feasted upon their experiences…

I once left my fingerprint in soft dust on a smoothly painted sill,
Hoping you would summon me, demand my simple explanation.

Outside rain hung like winter-sleepy bees, visiting the elder
and tiny courageous apple one last time.

They have out-waited you, who were not my friend.
And all your words,
Not of encouragement or even love.
But of condemnation, the way impatient storms
brush aside empty dinghies,
hungry for larger shores.

We never danced in syncopation, you and I.
Instead we stepped within each other
And grew separate…

[The crows upon my tongue]

It’s a cold place inside
a discarded man
Do you remember the first morning?
You brought me juice and a flower
I lay across your thighs
and counted your smiles
Your eyes warmed my skin
Your hands led me across
the adventure of your body
We were children for a day a week
Was it that long?
And now those same eyes
are broken windows
as barred and forbidden as caves
beneath the waterline
Last night we fought again
Two insects leaping at the glass
Bruising splitting with every blow
Today we limp uneasily
My tears puddle uselessly inside
A silent haemorrhage
Whilst yours are greedily drunk
By your sisters
What will you tell them?
How much have we forgotten?
There are two ends to every journey
Two threads unraveled
Two lives pecked apart
by the crows that live upon our tongues

[Whimsy number 1]

There are morning when a man awakes
to find that he has lived the wrong life.

All his friends are fenceposts
or have lost themselves among queues
of willow.

The soldiers came last night, they say.

They smelt our fear and made a soup of it.
Still the sparrow visits each tree, stopping to
compose a poem upon the barbed wire.

The oranges hang gladly in the orchard
behind the moss and bricks.

the rotten, rusty bucket

dreaming...