Drowned World
Broken-hearted dreams
Slip beneath the swollen river’s surface
Mask sloughed
For a new face, old lines
Become faint
Old desires
Gone, exposed
By the pain of betrayal
As illusions, dancing figures
Cast by light
Upon the water
A new world now,
New pictures, dressed
In other colours
A mystery behind
The atom thin pretence
At a past
Faded into lies
The things she loved
She never loved
Were obscure sentences
Now meaningless
Colours over still deep pools
The chatter over phones
The shudder of the trains at night
All the dreams suppressed
Lost upon the shore and covered
Drunk into dark hearts
Into eyes that never penetrate
The skin
The blue of irises
The black, the wordless depth
Within
A drowning pool
The hollow space
Promised in his eyes
The same routine
Same shortfall, all the words
In the end just words
And magic, only magic, fails…
The curled, sick creature
Painted so vividly
And needed to be true
Atrophies
Forgotten
As the doubt slides in
Like glass poured over city lights
Pictures held
Shimmering, smashed electric blades
Of streetlights poised
Bright knives, waiting for the kill
The shifting pleasures
Dreaming against
The hard concrete landscape
The forgotten daylight
Scarred by our passing
Precise shadows bound
In repeating patterns, measurable
And stretched unto
The vanishing point
The impossible
Meeting of parallel lines
Jethro Perkins 03/04/07