the Past is an old pair of shoes
or cement filled footprints,
and you don’t want to care
too much about where
I have walked so I’m going
to change it and say the generation
of a Past is like playing monopoly,
but with people, relationships
traded for knowing something
instead of owning it. you roll
her onto her side
and move the top leg
to like in the Recovery Position,
two eggs brunching on the inside
thigh of the bottom leg
as you penetrate and restore
to a default position, a stillness
in ask-for-nought bliss.
and it’s exactly because
these sudden relationships
start with surprises and gifts
from the Community
Chest that the afternoons slip
by till it is the morning
of the Night, sunset
concluded with a snap
of the neck
on the wine bottle
the cork breaking
inside, because
you explain, there was no
corkscrew, and the driver
you’d used you’d slipped
pushing in the cork,
but pouring
out the contents
through her stocking
not my good
stockings, she yells!
they weren’t
her good ones, they
were the pair
you’d worn
that first day alone
in her flat
when she’d gone
to work
and you checked
her draws
out, avoiding sleep
with the hard promise
of waking in that
empty inside out sensation
coming off a break
-neck, day-long drinking
spree, from Dawn’s
midday to the dead midnight
of the awful afternoon
in the stained glass of autumn,
pouring the porridge of cement
of addiction around your ankles
and for 18 mths I clonked
around with cement soles
treating her, Trafalgar,
like Old Kent Road,
refusing the Her
it was this time
any babies, but who’d
I save yr from
I said, ya
just don’t know.
Thanks Dean, I learnt the position referred to is the ‘recovery position’. Great image of those concrete shoes metaphor, the strained wine through stockings, the actuality of it all! The ‘stained glass of autumn’, what a fall of light in those few words.
eggs
brunching on the inside
thigh of the bottom leg
is an image i might take to bed tonight