Secrets & Lies & Paroxysm

Was it good to taste the
Warmth between her thighs,
Wedding ring coruscated in half-light
As veiled froth in kitchen-sink fetid water?

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung like a cliché
Traipsed across cotton sheeted affairs,
All the scene needed was a plastic crucifix and
It’s A Sin throated from the hotel radio chained to the bed.

Was it worship,
That need for praise to build the temple body
Held together by thrusting fingers and lashed tongue,
Vulval lips tightening as the tension held?

On hill of bone arches, legs opened to enfold a world
So distant from office furniture and break-time cigarettes.
Crushed her burning mouth to ashes
Aware, even then, we were cremating
An afterbirth as it was being born.

Cadence of her whispers, inexplicably in French,
Bardot breath instinctively wrapped the sword
In sheaths of soft flesh and wanton desolation.
There would be no coming back.
//
After the carnaval
Later, much later,
Stolen lipstick didn’t drag a cigarette to the bone
Graved rosewood eulogies to weekend lovers.
Postcards of blood to the nearly departed.

Brighton rocked to the slurp of sea o’er shale,
What stayed in my mind was the old drunk’s voice
Trailing Ol’ Blue Eyes to the foot of an eternal pier,
Walking the plank to where the dead collect sunlight in jars
Staccato of wooden steps stuttered rhyme over love crime.

Stealing hours on the 08.59
Conductor clipped tickets as confetti,
Each platform an aubade tombstone.

Did she smell of me as the family roast
Hoisted onto her dinner table gallows?
Did she dribble red wine from her wound?
Desire is a dish best served cold.

On lonely nights,
Fucking her with my hand
Only stilled the engines of late night cabs.
Emotional air-raids blitzed sanity
No amount of poetry could smash societal glass.

When you read old diaries
And they appear as words of a stranger,
Calligraphy of yesterday on traffic-light canvas.

It’s as if…..
Sign language suddenly wakes up screaming,
Cave man etchings of stick people fall off walls -
Pyres of limbs atop a stencilled cock.

As if…..
She never wanted me to call her Jane
Tersely, she countered, ‘it’s Mrs Smith.’
Even the most fragile of creations is never lost.

It’s always, it seems, as if…..