She was different. She was
you as you were: sucked in, soiled,
manouvred and painted:

They spent their time on you,
they saw something in you
that wasn't in me, no matter how bright my hair,
no matter how much I tried to train it, to fill it
with a glaring substance,

Somewhere beneath the mass of white they saw
that I had merely drained it.

Two thousand and six.
The year I dyed it.
The year you dated her.
The mornings we spent
in coffee shops,
a shock of purple beneath my eyes:

well-equipped and dry:
pinned-up and garish,
like bright-coloured girls in war posters,
crinkled characatures of dreams,
full of words and concepts:

How charm was not to be trusted,
How handwritten poems were better:

Parlance, smiling, patiently hovered
above our heads, tracing the idealist;
her steady metamorphosis;
She saw acutely the blurred
and crooked outline, and heard

the tapping, blinking of the punctured eyes
into which she prised her words.

Diction crept stealthily into the silence, climbing higher
for a sighting of the music, winding
through the throat of life
and listening for
the lines which were to tell me since

how charming I can be.

Things change.

We do not know ourselves but we percieve

from what the others say or do not say,

from within the clarity of a sodden monday:

the dance or the picturesque stroll along the street:

seeing you and having nothing to remit; nothing to lay down or to relay

and in my ears the whisper of every beat

to which we dance a while then slowly dance away.