In the busy coffee houses
That I frequent,
The waiters – they don’t know me
But lately, they spill my latte
(Almost) at will.
Grungy gamines
Trip and fall on the lines and verses
That I feed them;
They’re never hungry –
And they only sniff at
The pages of the books that I leaf.
2. Prying eyes make it difficult
For me to ascend the staircase
To the stage where
A podium and the microphone
Long fashioned into a lonely noose
awaits me;
My trousers soaked through
With hot coffee
and cold spite
Cling to me
like the words that I peel off
One by one and discard upstage.
3. I rise and take my place
in the lonely spotlight
nevertheless
To aver the angst
On behalf of my
Shiftless generation;
Scared shitless generation
With too many stories
To tell
And bubbles
like the bile to the back of my throat and spills out of me like so:
4. A goth-ed chick
Stands before me
The Dark around her eyes
Absorbs the light
In a monotone drawl
She says:
‘I am the queen
of mono-syllabic rage’
And bludgeons me
With her soliloquy.
5. ‘Shit!’ She calls me.
‘Bitch!’ I reply
And shift my eyes downstage.
I search the glare
For a love long lost.
And try not to recall
How I was once impaled
On that love
Pierced and tattooed
And Twisted as you.
6. Was I Ever more
Than the object of
Your murderous fixation?
Another one of your
Trampled flowers
Another door
That you preferred to keep closed
And the retreating light
From above the threshold
In the face of your rage
7. Your eyes juxtaposed
Bring me
Sharply into focus
And line me up
With the horns
On your face
Four legs and four feet
Hastily scratch
The dusty ground
Shaking the folds
Of her dark grey
Skin
8. And shakes
the empty branches
of a tree long silent
And a heart that
still trembles
And pines,
For the shadows
That haunt its every corner,
And the yearning
Each time
the rhinoceros climbs down
And peers in.
No comments:
Post a Comment