Summer Clothes

Our audience stepped back
With a cautionary gasp
At the transformation that can
Take place in a day
Of pacing rooms and muttering
‘But I miss you. I miss you…’
Into empty spaces between
Hospital beds
Where the poetic lines and the
Night time thrills
Mean nothing more than
Prescription pills
To make the shadows go away.

Go away, go away! And bring
Back the time
When I held your hands
In a greener place
And the dust, it settled around
Us both.
Where licence plates meant less than your face
And the mountains leaning towards that face
Changed direction.
They always changed direction.

Well, I guess we were wearing our summer dresses.
Covered in seamless thoughts and unfiltered pretences,
Ignoring the sounds of the shrinking LCD.
Providing a soundtrack to someone else’s TV.
But that sharpened taste of salt and cigarettes
Which danced itself around your neat breath
Gave birth to lips, cracked, dry and worn
And ate up the sound where the present was born.
Now it seems to me that all I have left is
A selection of choices and straightened up crests
And the loosened threads
From our summer dresses.