No Return

The mind is willing,
but the body lets me down.
Iโve been here before,
Iโve been here before.
Wrung dry,
hands shaking,
Frozen
in the execution.
Too much spent for
No return.
Forty-eightโโโ
the last twenty years
disappear,
reveal the hunger
that still gnaws
beneath it all,
coming back
to me โ
Flash through memory.
Slash of rain,
Warm wet lips in alleyway.
Twenty-eight,
a year of
exploration,
feeling through.
Waning moon,
Orion over Observatory Hill.
Burrowed down, buttocks
in the dirt,
your tongue inside me.
Stretching of boundaries,
Holding love that cannot be,
the self-deluding misery,
Wanting what I cannot have โ
Lingering
like the scent of musk,
left behind in
Elevator Love,
feel it slip away.
Running circles
through the years โ
Faces change,
then disappear.
Sitting in the silence of a
bedsit in Darlinghurst,
Waiting for the voice that says
Begin
Againโโ
Legs splayed,
counting down.
Red shoes and
white hospital gown.
Garlic burst at 5 โ
Unconsciousness,
and deep unrest.
Waking free โ
Cleared of possibility.
Empty womb, the future
flushed away,
to try again
another day โ
Years of hope, but
nothing came,
the money saved
to pay the doctors
for the needles
and the drugs,
to stimulate
the start of life
that ended โ
Stunted โ
before it could
begin,
feel it
slip away.
So here I am again โ
Creation by another name.
Telling tales of failure โ
But never of defeat.
