Women slip from winsome
under their senescent faces –
their hands steal the looks
off youth’s eyed-embraces –
They pleasure in pastimes
of tease-tricks and flirts –
they command your heart –
their hard rules will subvert
I want to reach out
and trace your lined beauty –
of furrows and laugh lines
worn freely at forty
I will kiss your eyelids
of stitch-tightened skin –
because here is your beauty –
it is still within
I found value in my love for you
under Aurelius and Epictetus –
so I purchased a one-way ticket
to end my lonely sojourn abroad
I wasn’t tempted in empty deserts –
no fingers took my potent virtue –
no foreign lips encouraged sin –
But I saw mirrors on their pages
and I watched myself translating –
framing – like Christ – opportune times –
I saw my mouth speak in tongues
telling you to taste my poison
Now I unpack my emptied bags
having brought back nothing more –
I left behind heavy possessions
which I no longer wish to share
I leave clues in the bathroom –
empty blisters of pills –
Leonard is everywhere
singing of stiffening thrills
Affection is not infecting
the bodies in the beds
and children speak in whispers
because of what is said
All I want from your presence
is engagement and thoughts
instead we stare at screens
and read others’ fingered words
My weight is dropping daily
whilst the world fattens up –
I would pray for forgiveness
but I’d be praying far too much
Behind my eyes,
becalmed in bed,
as the rooks clatter
in the lime trees,
and the last barks
of a dog trails off,
I am in the entrepot
of my memories,
picking at the skin
of scar tissue love,
I peel back time,
to make the past bleed
with the lifting
of rough scabs,
and with this peeling
comes a sore wound
which will not heal,
because I scratch it
into an angry mess:
her mark remains.
