Battered bookworms
turning a familiar turn
(always left)

For those that leave:
your threads become part of the tapestry,

a picture writ with deep love, excitement, applause,
dire fears and tiredness,

here be dragons and arrows in eyes

but despite the hamfists
of some intrusive hands,

there to see forever

Sea calm,
Crew slept,
Dark side,
Sea kept,
Tide raced,
Waves crept,
Crew woke,
Sails prepped,
Coiled spring,
Waves leapt,
Overboard,
Crew swept,
Left behind,
They wept.

For the sea has no respect
For the nautically inept …

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                  When in Babylon
                       Don’t Do as the Babylonians Do

King Nebuchadnezzar died young, and that’s
From a lifetime of smoking those ziggurats

Dolorous and pale-faced
Mountain peaks of barren waste
Create the raging winds that blast
The adamant, eternal past.

Yet here a happy sylph resides
Within the fabric of the sky
Whereat she blows her breath of change
To warm again the mountain range.

plastic cups and bottles
cigarette stubs and ash
and scattered powder
heaped as white as snow
amid bunched and ***** bank notes
and piles of wine washed cash

Upon a cracked and half-full crystal glass
A smear of lipstick flashed as red as rubies
and there, upon the littered, dusty floor
lay banana peels and half-eaten apple cores

The blonde girl, with the ashen face
painted nails, and scarlet bee-stung lips
lay there amid the crushed potato crisps
and the flattened curry sauce smeared chips

Her eyes, dilated pupils shrouding grey
stared upward at the rain washed light
of Wintery day, filtering through each
hand -smeared cobwebbed window pane
at light that she would never see again

That morning, after the party, the room was quiet as death
disturbed by a black moth that flew from behind the curtain
settling upon her face, brushing lips parted with her final breath