There on the bridge
Trying to feel lonely
If not a poet, then alive
You stare deep into the river
Until its amber hush puts out the traffic of your thoughts
Ripples like windscreen wipers like violin bows
Yet silent
A plane had left smoke trails like fading scars
Reminded you of tracks made by a dragged crucifix
But whose now,
You had the strange anxiety of
Not wanting to be cremated or buried
Wondered if something else could be done with you
He had laboured over your smile
Like piloting red smoke from a plane
All day long
Would simply brush you hair behind your ear
Like digging a shell out of white sand
And your smile said content though your eyes
Were like the band still playing as the ship sank
As though no one could ever truly know you
So how could anyone mourn
You thought of how it wasn’t anyone’s fault
It was the lethargy of your tongue
That couldn’t move, a slug in salt
Wanted to stay in its bed all day long
You always pushed into the side
of your cheek as you sketched
Like a thumb sculpting out a clay mouth from darkness
You were chipping away at
Renaissance figures in the un-sculptured clouds
Until the sky bent into the aperture of a storm
But stayed, only darkened. Wide open
Your head hooked to the stars
And your body draped from your shoulders
Like a suit on a charity shop hanger
Of someone passed away
You seemed so out of place
The way objects are sketched painfully into their
New positions
Things scribbled against their will
A lighthouse casting only shadows over grey glass
Anguished under the to and fro
Of your hand moving like a wayward kite
Charcoal waves erased over and over each other
Like empty condolences to a widow
Deeper into the river your eyes
Two anchors cast from the stillness of your concentration
As an orchestra serenades the sinking ship
Until the violins drown completely in their self spun oblivion
The river adds your eyes
To its mystery
In the distance people appear
as rubbish tossed about in a dislocated wind
From the open lid of the sky
The rusted puddle of a bin tipped over
Spewing yesterdays news
They are either rushing home
Or waiting vacantly to be taken away
The busses come like street cleaners
Blowing leaves and stars out of gutters
Old photographs stand in pub doorways
Dead smiles like day moons
Drinking amnesia
Fading in their chiaroscuro
As though you were sketching them from a distance
Then I watched you, throw that notepad over the bridge
Flapped its charcoal wings and landed just side of the river
I found it like an injured bird, in it you had written
"today, I no longer believe in beauty"
In a kind of suicide, in which you were more
in your art than your body
It was in that moment I felt the opposite
She had drawn me
Last week when it was snowing
Her cheeks red as if just kissed
She held a piece of chalk in thick red gloves
Her smile said beauty in german
And outshone the bridge
It was me,
She had sketched me brushing layers
of snow from the railings
As though I were sprinkling it into the river
She walked home, back through the city
As though following a trail of photographs
Spilled from an open suitcase
By someone who loved her until yesterday
Someone she had met online
After seeing them play a bedroom acoustic version
Of a cure song
And you listened to that song on headphones
Beneath your hood as you became a shadow
Going through the subway
A few silhouettes loitered like crows on the railings
If one spits you’ll graffiti the wall red you thought
Your slender fists clenched like shells tucked in your pockets
But they only stare, watch you pass
The way blown litter stops, every so often
Trembles, anxiously
As though young, scared to be alone
Overnight, as she sat with his guitar
Playing a song he had taught her
From the open window
It started snowing
You threw the guitar into the street
But the ground was too soft to break it
And the next day, as you stepped into the
world that had fallen onto your doorstep
You had to pass it
When you went over the bridge
You saw the snow still intact on the side
Someone had carefully tucked your notepad there and had gone
Your brushed it off, and found
Simply scribbled on the front,
Beauty
*quote by Kim Hughes*
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