Have you seen the swifts departing or heard their solemn call
across the housetops, the smudge of bronze-brick chimneys
a hoar frost hanging grey, the scoop skin of ripe, wild blueberry
we had been dovecote lonely while nights prussian swallowed
hard the scuttle in my clothed throat I could not easily find words

I never dreamt of such regret, squeezing through scaled memory
faint illusions, ghostly demons with faces that I could recognise
who smiled inside my dread, rebounding from the sides nightly
left by the summered pathway of my long, interrupted childhood
those sober dreams were animated films driven, lost, fragmented

where I would wake silently the bleak sound of sobbing in my head
I was often on a schooner, in imagined tales, as a sharpened knife
as a skulking stowaway always troubleshooting escaping my anxiety
in the midshipman’s parlour, at their salted table, I read the stories
stains in the grainy, weathered oak, written with punishment of blood

the sharpest tales, the ones in the shadow of green, refracted light
confused the bottle with my life, I the priest confirming my own rites
the horrors of golden piss take control, I see the rats, gnawing teeth
the hill I climb always taller, leaning back, a burden I push on wheels
tracks are laid behind me, the blackened engine, honking, gaining

the contrasts of light, shade, beauty, lethal cuts from a blade of grass
trauma confused by grace should never wear a happy face or smile
always the sentinel, grim as icy water we wade through, explorers
who reach the island, a shot in the veins from a non-religious tract
a pioneer pamphlet, you write your seminal piece and I am pregnant

I am adorned with wraiths, seaweed of the deepest, blackest seas
where monsters gather, lamplights on Poseidon, ugliest of brothers
all this I feign carry on my itching, lashed back, turned against treason
I, once a small child with Marvel comics, sugar puffs, tooth fairies
stand a metalled man, a trophy of the Greeks, my cheeks blushed

                                                  ©edenbraytoday04.10.2021