Sport 24: Summer 2000
A Brooch On Your Lapel
A Brooch On Your Lapel
In the insouciant light of the garden
Seen from the scabrous greyness the alley has secreted from the sun,
An angel, a blinding saint, cocks
His head to brush the tassels of his locks.
The gleaming strands untangled, she feels them
Like fiery needles threading through the hole in the hedge
& Piercing the lump of jasper she has knotted in her scoundrel's chest.
She'll mix in his affairs, gangrene his spirits
With flatteries & lies, promises & kissed deceits.
His body will topple into the graveyard she trawls behind her,
At her throat. She knows her intentions will blacken &
Slick around his loveliness, insidious, consuming it.
If only he could stay, flickering in that glass garden,
Warming her eyes with a softness of the light
That could turn her coveting into love.
In the doorway of the evening,
When the pinks & the oranges bring out the yellows, he is taken in,
Not on sufferance of the sweet tongue, but in the half-light,
On the teeth of the lies themselves.
She is dashed on his glass & his glass on her.
The predator in her will not be his undoing but his doing in.
He will supplicate his pale flesh to the reds & blues of her bruising.
He will say my criminal, wear me as a pin,
A brooch on your lapel.