Another cup of coffee,
another last cigarette,
waiting to get over that something
I had never managed to hunt
and pin down in a display case.

Chase the thoughts with endless distraction,
habitual reactions to commonplace panic;
the skin on your milk,
the lines in your face-
the colonies in your bedsheets.

A futile blur of words,
ancient shapes and poems,
I scour neurotropic fields of sunflowers:
some organic high,
a steady-state escapism.

Houdini would be proud.
This brave escape from detection,
'till only odour and circumstance
can pick me from the crowd,
this red-eyed happiness,
this stalwart blue.

Chase love down with a box of wine,
old methodologies to find something new;
the drunk-dial confession,
the marks on your arm-
the lies in your back pocket.

Another cup of coffee,
another chemical cloak;
another hourglass intervention.
Meaning slips through hands like sand
when you decorate your life

with obsessive mirrors
and uncontrollable smoke.