You saw your disintegration
In the shrouded reflection of a store window
Already losing custom
And for years prior
Women adjusted hose and children’s grubby faces wiped
In that smeared glass
It held
Decades
Like high cheekbones
Will shore up time in a beautiful face
I saw my eyes fail me
In the encroachment
Of some uninvited color
As if the sun
Greedy for attention
Had left a permanent marker
The doctor
With his accentless voice
And starched finger tips
Probing my retina
For answers like a tarot card reader
Will shuffle and cut her deck
Declared me blemished
Stained by time
Imperfect
Possibly going blind, wrapped in news print
And I laughed
The same laugh my grandma had
When terrible news was delivered
Along with cold dishes and
Empty seats where once our ancestors sat
Filling the roost of our quaking bones
Marking time and Advent
She would raise a thin lipped glass
Of “this n’ that”
To Gods and Monsters
To Plato, Communism and Woody Allen (before we knew we was a paedophile)
There should be a preface to every memory
She said; toasting velvetine shadows
Swilling away the horror
Like a rinsed mouth will always be
More kissable
And come New Year’s Eve
We’ll forget our enemies and join shoulders
Kicking our long legs into space to the chime of twelve
Not yet knowing
What will become if those flung into the future
To forge ahead alone
Unsupported in ancestry
Just the sound of voices
A snatch of tune
The smell of half finished dinner, paused forks suspended in song
Stewing pears over cheap white wine
Her hands red like mine
From scrubbing too hard
That blemish
It won’t come out
So it sinks
Orange streaks of sunlight beneath green orbit
And a stranger in a bar once remarked;
You have gorgeous eyes like they came from the depth of sea
All green and lost
And I think of loss
A stray button, a missed appointment
Maybe I won’t return
To the doctor who found my stigmata
Bleeding like a fish cut on rocks
Into the very bones of earth
See? I don’t anymore, my eyes look inward
In the old days we toasted with pink cut glass
It was all anyone could afford
And I remind my American friends of this
Poverty after the war
A tendency to never feel
Safe
Like city foxes
Scour
Empty streets
For scraps
And squint
At the harsh glare of street lamps
Attracting insects
Bleached yellow
By the piercing quality
Of their intent
TheFeatheredSleep 