Sophia

Sophia

On the Saturday,
meat still on the bones of it we met,
there, inverted in the Underground
as if I'd lured that doe-eyed Goddess to a tri-headed hound,
to a crowd
of unknown faces,
unset names in sweet-shadow.

The smell of sweat and misaimed piss
was dripping down the walls.
It was my kind of Heaven,
another kind of Heaven
but not the place where we traded paper,
form and pearlescent pen.

I didn't contemplate
the tinge of lipstick left upon a shot glass
that I downed
as if she was bearing witness
to a version of me she'd held - -
being shattered,
being consumed,
becoming wasted.

I watched concern
paint that vessel golden,
make my darkness a great envelope
in which she couldn't unstick.

Reality is a harsh weight
sat upon the wax blot
of our other coughed imaginings.

It's different feeling seen.

We rested alongside each other,
a blushen, soft Persephone
glowing against the roadkill
that may once have made a Demeter
but Hades would now be the name.

Caught myself tempting,
without pomegranate
I offered passionfruit
but abstinence was on her tongue,
an atrophy of my well exercised alter-ego,
the wanting to occasionally be
a more confident self.

So when she'd gone,
as all bright lights tend to do,
and the room,
and the people,
and the sweat,
and the piss,
and the street
and the names,
and the gumption,
and the risk
all subsided
into another good night...

I laid my harvested wisdom down,
beside my damage
and my likeable qualities,
a rich, gooey cocoon
of all life's in-betweens,
the undefinable chaos
of being human.