What does your love feel like?
Is it soft and fluid
Or does it cloy on the teeth
Like a bloodied, boxer’s mouth?
Does it make the heart sick
With sweet, sweet sugarings
That spin and drip in sticky clouds
Or as dry as a vacillating savanna
Flecked with dead oases
And forgotten bone?
Is it warm and peaceful
Or does it retch
Like the last breath of a suicide?
© Mel Lampro
Everyone is dead
While my core tick, tick, tick
Ticks like a fat baby
Floating for breath.
Shades of owls and razors
Slice and screech in my sleep
Pressing me to cut
Loose from
You
Him
Her
Them
This
Everyone.
Tick, tick, tick.
© Mel Lampro
I’m an artist, a dreamer, a drifter, a slave
To the pressures that squeeze me until I’m concave
Like a mirror that flexes away from the light and
Only observes what is written at night.
I speak the language of whomever is nearest
My chameleon tongue chides the hearts that are dearest and
Closest to me yet, I cannot feel love.
It’s the stranger who weeps by my grave, my dove
It’s the stranger who weeps by my grave.
© Mel Lampro
He was perfect. Lounging across the front seat of a dilapidated car, looking every inch the boy that borrowed his father’s saloon for the prom and hoping that his best girl didn’t mind the smell of wet dog or the bubbled paint that flaked from the bodywork like a bad sunburn.
One hand on the steering wheel, the other dangling from the driver’s side window, fingers drumming gently on the door as he laughed and chattered with my neighbour. I could have watched him for a lifetime, with his troubled hair and faded T-shirt, he was everything I wanted and nothing but unreachable.
Too young, too cute and too absorbed in my pretty, animated neighbour – with her caramel eyes and streaming curls – water spilling over pebbles that bobbed and rippled in the early autumn sunlight.
I felt awkward in my work clothes and tried to pass them by, hoping that their conversation would engage them long enough for me to escape into my house unnoticed but, as soon as my hated high heels trip-trapped across the loose gravel on the street they both looked up. She with her dazzling smile and he with such a look of total vulnerability that inside I faltered and fell.
The polite introductions felt thick in my mouth, my lips dried and dragged on my teeth and I felt my smile harden like stale icing. My cheeks flushed as I fell over simple words and I dug my fingernails into my palms – I fired an excuse about having an evening meeting and ricocheted off the street.
Slam. Safe. Breathless.
Previously Published:
No Love Lost: 1 (Slim Volume) Paperback – 7 Dec 2014
Edited by: Kate Garrett
Available from Amazon
© Mel Lampro
D'emo 