Damage

 

Damage

 

In the morning - an apology.

 

Now, here was a shock,

after all there exists

so many more deserving causes.

 

You’ll read it carefully

and, in wide-eyed surprise,

fire off a quick-witted response

because you are.

 

But of course, seconds later

you wish you’d taken more care

with implications there

of why the need for sorry?

Vulnerability of the down-a-pegged giver

will stay with her,

and she won’t forget

to make mincemeat of you yet:

well, depending on how big she is.

 

Of course, you see it all.

Striations. Those invisible patterns

radiating from her mind,

and those of her rivals

rocking her chartered world,

and some, to be fair,

you gave her yourself to unfurl.

Striations in conflict with striations,

blind visions that blunder

and perhaps she’s buckling under

the weight of everyone’s patterns

in clashing colours that cannot mesh:

well then, here’s stress.

 

Entombed in a buttressed castle

from high battlements she’s gazing

down - because who is to say

which mosaic, which tile

will prevail with just cause?

 

All these forces contradict

and make for choppy seas

of chop-logic, you found yourself

across the desk from baleful eyes

that had not slept,

where you should have

your own counsel kept,

but, too late, cry havoc and let slip

those words she now regrets.

 

So, tell her you love her,

no damage done,

until here comes another one

and of course, there is some

while you’re left wondering why,

out of all those deserving

she could have picked,

she picked you?

 

But, in the morning – an apology.

Striations

 

Striations

 

Baleful watchers from crimson skies

at distance, possess Jupiter’s red eye,

speak nothings of us in slingshot ire;

and stay their thunderbolts and fire.

 

They say: let all your four winds blow,

crack your cheeks, you hurricanoes,

where hot lava cools into striations

and your fighters take up their stations.

 

Slipshod, in fight-night boxing rings,

with corrugated ropes of cosmic string,

more just than corners in blue or red,

paint here two more colours instead.

 

Enflamed striations from our minds

impress themselves upon the blind,

invisible and unseen, in black flashes

shot skywards into night’s lashes

 

in raptures, perhaps we stuck it on you,

the tossing ship, the hapless crew,

by slinging striations of sticky silk

from wrists, in twists of cobweb built.

 

There’s guilt. But no room to breathe,

when striations from we other three

overlap you in dreary cuttlefish conflicts,

all squitting ink and lack-boned squid.

 

And all our striations are interlocked

in daggered drawn gunpowder plots.

and minute shocks against each other,

while all the time we smile like lovers,

 

No cartographer exists that can chart

some Sargasso Sea, or place apart

where seaweeds stop and still the boat,

for seasick swimmers to stay afloat.

 

Malignant watchers in crimson skies

are showing little or no surprise,

but move nought to scissor our striations,

just rubbing brows in contemplation.