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Jun 2016
.                                                              

                                                               ­   "The wind rustles the forget-me-nots
                                                                ­      In the many balcony flower boxes
                                                           ­                       And so the shrieks of foxes
                                                                ­                               lose their distance."

She’s inside,
finding her bearings.
Fiddling her earrings
around.
******* cardamom pods
White.
And smoking licorice black cigarettes
Her lips faintly popping as the smoke escapes,

                                                       ­   Pop,

And reflecting how she’s been
As lucky as lavender isn’t.

                                                         ­         "the wind sharpens the beach dunes
                                                           ­                    flutters my tangerine towel,"

                                                      Po­p, pop,

                                                           ­        "fills my little girl's glitter-gel shoes"

No,

                                                    ­      Pop

She rubs it out before she sets it down,
sharpening her eraser.
Settling her glass
no chaser.

Her cigarette smokes on its own in the ashtray
a straight grey line caught in the breezes
from the door frame and under the floorboards,
like a seismograph recording of a dancer’s hips
or like any sound man could ever consider making,
escaping up to heaven from the tip of Babel.

She takes back her black ***
Before any more paper evaporates.

                                                          -Lig­ht-
                                                         Pop, pop

Her poems are great shipping tanker oil spills
of vowels,
hoping the reader feels their lips
mouthing kisses along with it.

                                                            ­  Pop

                                                          ­                           "no one ever really tastes
                                                                ­                          one another on theirs,
                                                                ­                                                or saliva,
                                                         ­                                                       so weak
                                                            ­                                     weak as the smell
                                                                ­                                  of potent *****."

Now the wind's at the window,
disturbing a spider
abseiling slowly
and inevitably
as falling snow

                                                           ­    Pop

into the ashtray.
A lifetime of weary acceptance of tragedy.


                                                      ­       -Stub-
Playing with page placement, I wanted people to imagine there was a line of cigarette smoke running straight up it's center, or a spider abseiling down on a thread, separating the real from the poem.
Harry Randle-Marsh
Written by
Harry Randle-Marsh  England
(England)   
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