BITTER SUITE

i) BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1)
A spider wanders aimlessly within the warmth of a shadow
Not the regal creature of border caves (2)
But the poor, misguided, directionless
Familiar of some obscure Scottish poet.

The mist crawls from the canal
Like some primordial phantom of romance.
To curl, under a cascade of neon pollen,
While I sit tied to the phone like an expectant father
Your carnation will rot in a vase.

ii) LOST WEEKEND (3)
A train sleeps in a siding,
The driver guzzles another can of lager
To wash away the memories of a Friday night down at the club.

She was a wallflower at sixteen (4)
She’ll be a wallflower at thirty four,
Her mother called her beautiful
Her daddy said a whore.

iii) BLUE ANGEL (5)
The sky was Bible black in Lyon (6)
When I met the Magdalene, (7)
She was paralysed in a streetlight
She refused to give her name.

And a ring of violet bruises
They were pinned upon her arm.
Two hundred francs for sanctuary

And she led me by the hand
 

To a room of dancing shadows

Where all the heartache disappears
And from glowing tongues of candles

I heard her whisper in my ear.
 

"J’éntend ton coeur"
I can hear your heart

​

iv) MISPLACED RENDEZVOUS
It’s getting late, for scribbling and scratching on the paper.
Something’s gonna give under this pressure
And the cracks are already beginning to show,
It’s too late.
The weekend career girl never boarded the plane (8)
They said this could never happen again.
So wrong, so wrong.

This time it seems to be another misplaced rendezvous,
This time, it’s looking like another misplaced rendezvous
With you,
The parallel of you, you.

v) WINDSWEPT THUMB (9)
On the outskirts of nowhere,
On the ring road to somewhere,
On the verge of indecision.
I’ll always take the roundabout way,
Waiting on the rain
For I was born with a habit,
From a sign
The habit of a windswept thumb
And the sign of the rain
It’s started raining.