Opus

Rush

The inertia of everyday deludes me. It is
elusive and of obvious translucence,
like the memory of salt on my lips and lemon
in my paper cuts. A shade of grey from the ghost of a
cigarette and the curve of the Devil's lips
that poison the colour of rivers that turn into
roads, roads that run along borders that mark
countless towns on our bodies with static overflowing
the haphazard words in lilac and emerald ink
as we hold ourselves on fading mountain-tops and
contemplate our roles with our ruby glass fingers confined
in unfeeling walls of suburban prisons, like the light from
a solitary star buried under the clouds flickering
between the lines of familiar love stories
and the mirror image of a deserted artist through
the gaps of a passing night-time train,
a summer stain on the evening,
a blackbird abandoned in a forest fire.

The city's flaws and the song of the wind
that stir the leaves in the heat of a dying sun
on whitewashed cathedral walls in golds and greens
and stormy blues, re-writing histories revered among
plastic flowers and hand grenades, of the
raw and forgiving tenderness of lovers after a storm in
abandoned apartment rooms.