The ever after

In this place where love once lived
a dried up festered dream remains.
Golden rust of autumnal woods,
meandering paths of possibilities
waiting for us to walk down them
with love songs on our lips;
Now lost are the ways, harsh and tangled.

Loving once only to watch it die
not in a glorious poetic moment
but putrefy, with age and resentment
in a cheap terraced house of no note,
magnolia, with unfinished edges.

There is a child.
His pure hymnal laughter
shatters the mortuary air.
Another child grows
oblivious in my warm tomb;
astounding that cadaver like
I can grow a perfect life.

That mother was a patchwork quilt,
threadbare patches screaming apart,
she never held it all together.
And then this mother
cracking face and bleeding eyes
barren goddess to a child.

Can a child grow without dreams?

(July 2013)

A warm memory

Warm brown faces, dust-sweat streaked,
drooping trees and baking streets.
Brave little voices clamouring
in frenzied games of songs and stones.
Lost embraces from the past.

(Reworked. First draft 11/04/12 @The Priory. Listening to Jagjit Singh.)