Sunflowers

 

 

 

 

Will you come?

to this place where thoughts run 

crisp and cruel as vodka 

swallowing ice trapped, cracking

in a misty glass, hear it...

It's not the cracks that do for the ice

-tiny heart-quakes, survivable- 

It's the dissolving, the slow melt

They have machines for that here

and after, I'm allowed to repair  

to the smoking room, I do not smoke there

That would leave me nothing

 

Will you come?

onto the muddied lawn, spoiling your indoor shoes 

in the fallow plots, Against a sky high wall

the children planted sunflowers and

watched them (amazed!) grow magnificent and giant-headed

 

The heads hang brown now, beaten by rain

their great shaggy brows food for birds

Arm thick stems have no marrow, roots are mush

Could you cradle -in soft warm hands- the poor ruined faces

remind them of love, of joy and the laughter of children

Oh!  will you come?

 

The men here are Gods, with magicians hands and x-ray eyes

They decide what lives and what does not

They are building a pyre -with much murmuring and prettily coloured pills-

for a girl wrapped in celluloid, iced with an hand-inked personality

She leaks salty fluids from every orifice.  Always obedient, I leave her to the flames

 

Do not look at her corpse, she was beautiful and I am ugly, a useful body 

repaired to store-bought newness, I have learned to warm the pot, the oven, the bed

to wear long sleeves and a new face every morning, I can dissect a salmon

with all the skill of a heart man and not flinch at the purple-blooded liver

the pinkness of the lungs, the tiny stopped heart, will you ever come?