Conditions are prime
preservation will occur
as another murky layer
settles and sticks

The smoky dawn
holds no redemption
harsh words have left
their scorch upon the tongue

In one room, he lifts the toppled glass
In another, she straightens sheets, silently
A careless word, a glance
might prove the unwanted spark

No explosion will follow,  
not with this black and bitter tinder
Only a slow smoulder,
a quiet, crawling conflagration

Amber light in the quiet kitchen
sees him unscrew the cap
tip the whisky down the sink,
penitent, confessional

Dull thoughts
of drunken microbes
a mirthless smile
and a bottle, as empty as the gesture.

Not here
and not now.

So, you grew up,
leaving me Peter Panning for gold
amongst the grit of adulthood.
Your guitar gathers dignified dust,
while mine puffs and wheezes
yet another senile song,
an arthritic dog
treading painfully in step
with its selfish, thoughtless master.

I never envied you your brilliance
because it was shared, it was ours
but I've been toasting marshmallows on the embers
far too long.

And now your real life,
the one you've worked for, studied for,
sweated for
(and the one I've studiously ignored)
is to carry you over the sea
and away.
I have no doubt it is still your brilliance
that paves the trail,
But it's for others, now
and that is fine.
I am reconciled,
and full of hope for you and yours.

Let's see now:

G, B minor, C...

There's a song in here somewhere,
I know it.

Oh my
how they flap and slither
shades of shades of
ghastly crassness

Haven't harnessed
their atoms' fickle spins
spilling, instead,
through the strong and wise and deserving
befouling their blood

Gulping and gaping their own small slice of evil
while we will guard ours
in cages of guilt and fantasy

Spill then
spill slickly,
sick, stupid spectres
You strengthen my bars
beyond imagining

Three travellers
are walking side by side.
Says the first:
"This path is long and weary,
and my soul sickens
with every step.
All it shows us
is misery, disease, corruption and death.
This is the path of the ******!"

Says the second:
"No, my friend, you are wrong!
This path guides
my every golden step.
It draws me further
into the dazzling wonder
of this impossible world
and pulls me forward
with the promise of beautiful new horizons.
This path is truly blessed!"

Says the third:
"There is no path."

The first
and the second
are unmoved, however

For there is no third traveller.

A black maid enters.
Cowed, inarticulate,
she makes obeisance to her mistress,
our erstwhile heroine.

She is given a menial task
in a perfunctory fashion,
and you thrill at this splash
of historical colour.

But her mistress's command
is irrelevant.  She is fully engaged
with two vital functions
with which I have entrusted her.

The first: she has bathed our heroes
in moral ambiguity -
she is a shortcut to complexity,
rendering the important characters
doubly fascinating,
bathing them in pathos.

The second: she has pleased you
as you recognise your own outrage:
"Why must she be black?
Why can't they treat her better?
Don't we live in finer times, you and I?"
And a happy reader
is a reader who will proceed,
enlivened, vindicated, affirmed.

And thus freshly enslaved,
she returns
to the sculleries of my imagination
as we press nobly on.

my fingers felt
that new horizons beckoned
and dropped off, one
by one

my eyes, grown tired
of servicing my brain
popped out
and rolled into blind oblivion

my tongue
has slithered off
flicking foolishly,
untasting

they are lost, and rot
and I am poor, and broken

We were one
but now
we are nothing.