The clouds like carousal angels impaled
Not so merry going round
not so gently down the stream
Into no good night
No future to be scryed
in that pale blue cauldron attended by no witch
Just those clouds like swans floating inverted
Necks tucked in, ashamed perhaps
With hooks in their backs like umbrellas
In a fairground game only children play
Séance hands resting on the blank page
Waiting for the unexpected to happen
In a game only adults play
Like the low immune system of god
Held together by faith
A mosaic you only seen in churches
Would be out of place
When ours are graffiti on the walls
The world turns so slowly you don't notice
The horses leaving the carousal
With childhood on their saddles
Realisation is a nowhere near death experience with a second chance you never take
Like all your life reflected across a windsheld as you go through it
A tape measure let go snapping back
That once moment when you took the easy route in the city you were born
When the horse came round on the carousal
And the child had been taken
When you didn't tell her how you felt
And watched her walk into the rain
With your coat on
There are things you don’t notice
Because most things blend in
Like a child asking for a colouring book
In a busy station
And the mother shouting in an absent expression
A young boy standing there like a balloon floating away
And the girl who can never find the man that could compare to her imagination
Almost as if she needed to be lonely in order to keep that imagination alive
And no one realises except that guy sitting alone in the café
Looking out through the rain, not hearing the conversations
Not seeing the crowds
Just the two raindrops making their way down the glass
And the girl with tears under an umbrella
Sitting alone, everything a blur
Leaving a tip on the table, and a poem on the chair
A picture in the salt and a sigh in the air
Distant in thought as a bag caught in wind
Absorbing the mute details
His presence hardly there
But if you can look
Deep into the oceans of his eyes
Seeming calm but raging like a Dylan Thomas poem
colours through his stained glass eyes
Only seen from the inside
Or in a slowly read book on a train far from home
Like a scarf dropped in the snow
Belonging to a girl you’ll never know
People like that
Seeming unreal, not meant for this world
Regarded alone
Are poets that never meet
And write of their longing as if no such thing as the other could exist
Though pass each other on the street
Their shadows kiss
Feeling burdened by their deepened awareness
Of fleeting moments no one else seems to capture
As if they were holding them in their palms
And had to be still, a small sense of rapture
That the colour might rub off
And blend in with everything else
So they let go,
Put their hands in their pockets and hoods over their heads
As if becoming a shadow
Walking into a crowd all wearing the same coat
Like the two rain drops in the glass trickling down parallel
Stay still as the others become harder, looking like the glass might break
It may aswell,
He would sit there still, wearing his coat
Lost in thought
As if affixed to the same constant tintinnabulation of rain
And tyres slashing though neon reflections
Walking out into
The rain trickling down his glass face
Almost as if it might shatter into as many fragments
Walking through it
Like beaded curtained doorways
Brushed aside
And disappearing
In a small carboard theatre
On the sidewalk
No one but a child is watching until the end
The puppeteer realises and improvises the script
becomes
Punch and juliet
The girl with the umbrella fighting with it
Like Alice with the stubborn flamingo purposely limp
Coming inside and finding the poem on the chair
About her
all watercolour neon streets
and lampights bleeding lost expressionism on black pavements
the lost art of forgetting all that you know and remembering
everything at once as vivid as the first time you saw those things
and this is how she appears inside her canvassed world
as a winter princess with raven hair
describing each and every raindrop
Falling from the hood of her world
like heiroglyphs only she could translate
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