He seems to subsist
solely on cigarettes,
And gazes hazy eyed at the streets.
His lost time takes its toll,
And his face is like clasped hands
Scooped from flesh.
You know?
He used to be a good man, a doctor.
He laughed like a house; like a blood bag drained and red.
But there were too many blood-spattered walls and bad deaths.
Now underwhelmed and overdrawn,
As his clock taps time away in syncopation.
Nostalgia’s streetlight sepia still gripped his throat some days, of being
under sunrays, sports club fun-days and skies of grey.
And then fucking each other’s flaws away.
He took it for granted, until time came that smiles only arrived wet-eyed and
wine-stained.
Now he exists in empty rooms, dust all kicked up, glittering in the dirty
light.
He’s not alright, he’s not alright.
He fills his lungs
Stagnant smoke sticks, sunshine slips, he quivers with balled fists.
But his one bright moment
Of any day,
Is the stray
He called her Jenny; She was grey.
With short fur that clung to her taut skin in velvet waves,
Shaking and shimmering,
As she bounded over the bollards outside his window.
Staring up from her effervescent aqua irises
Shattered ice,
Splintered shades of
blue,
Spectrum like and
Sparkling with keen eyed abandon: cutting through the must with that hue.
There was always a silence there that deafened him,
Like a train that doesn’t stop at this station:
It seems to suck all the senses up into its presence,
And all else ceases to be.
Then she breaks free…
Continues bounding away
Until again, he is left lonesome in the dirty light.
Just… Coalescing.
As he seems to subsist solely on cigarettes,
And gazes hazy-eyed at the streets.