|
|
|
|
|
Carole Barkley
Date of Birth: 12/7/61 Location: Hull, East Yorkshire, England Email: viennabarley@hotmail.com Website: http://tradewindspoetry.homestead.com/index.html Publications: Poetic Licence, The Poet's Porch, Suero - Revista Cultural de Fuerteventura, Shades of Expression Awards: The Platignum Writers Award
THE MORNING AFTER
The wallpaper offers a silk resistance to his fingers.
Aqua, ochre,
diamonds trail down in fashionable
almost straight lines, barely finished and chic,
Telling and being told lies
of outrageous lilies and that faint suggestion
of blood in the shower.
The telephone rots and Rose-Bay-Willowherbs
choke the garden mauve because he likes
the sound of their name.
At eleven o'clock
the sun fingers an old guitar in the corner
which becomes a mandolin against a frescoed
Villa wall, maybe in Planos.
He could have been exotically curious then;
unlacing, lapping secrets from fig-dark eyes,
fingering curls with parted lips, awaiting
the damp press of belly against spine.
Ammonites are growing in the room.
Sleeping cat shaped silences vie with CD cases
and dead wine on the waxed beech
which needs the feeliness of bare feet
to be appreciated.
He didn’t notice, it all came down to dogs
Once the romanticism was stripped away.
If Tina were here, she would scrape her
wrecked blonde fringe from black eyebrows,
Light one Winston from another
And say with the wisdom of Socrates through
A smoke of Pink-Dream lips;
"Men are all the same --
Fuck you and fuck off --
Say, you got any beer in this place?"