hopelessness

Your love is like a winter icecream
and my funeral pyre tongue
knows only to lap it up.
Snow forms in my eyes all the while,
though I left my shutters open to fan the flames.

A warm breeze still dances its way
along the finery of my deepest thoughts,
sidestepping icepick arrows – the
drawbridge of kindling that spills from your throat garden.
Impossible not to swallow,
yet the aftertaste burns like a forest fire;
all the drowning promises now an ocean’d moat for your castle walls.

A drawn bridge might just as well be a goodbye on this canvas,
but the artist within me paints in colour.

Faced again with options,
– I am –
thumb sore,
from hitching a ride
to any direction
I’m taken:
partial nudity
framing the high risk
beneath these threads –
allowing nothing
but neglect
to course through these veins,
closer than a man’s knife.

Nothing but dis-ease
can stain like old graffiti:
stubborn and unwelcome,
and impossible to wash away.

It beckons to take my life
– this weed that chokes me –
but I know better than that:
it’s already gone.
What little of me remains
is always outside searching.

– red lights –

– red eyes –

– bloodied hope –

So I’ll take their word
– these men who stop to ogle –
and their banter,
and I’ll take the seat they offer
while I push their oily hands away,
just to sink back
for a moment
into the stubborn stench
of leathered history –
into the cosy
but broken seats
of the ride I’m taking now
– not the ride of my life,
but the pick-up
to another stop.

And as I sleep with eyes wide
and ears open
I search within

for freedom and peace

– an end to it all –

But it’s their cigarettes and coffee
that keep me breathing.