Birthday Past

Dark cake and a pair of shoes
On the grave outskirts of Saint James’s Park, just outside the gates, in fact,

On a grey paving slab, quiet clean, but
For the crumbs and smear, like dog shit,
In its roadside homelessness, nowhere

The sweet kitchen that supported it, we presume, before it got led astray, wandered from the safety of the

Picnic blanket, perhaps taken by these shoes..
But they lost their way, neither shoe can tell tales to passing

Strangers now, both are mute.
Was she Happy when she left?
We can only guess and hope she got some new shoes

Ballad of Will Killingsworth

He used to hoard his poems in a plastic bag –

They were heavy but the burglars threw them on their

Backs with the rest of his life – fill the cracks in theirs

With more crack.

 

Later, he came home and found it

Gone and worse, his poems taken, and he knew that

Somewhere, soon, they would decompose in the stink

Of rotting  food.

 

Nothing was left, he had no insurance, he had

No chip that housed anything good he’d ever said

With dread the sink dripped and he thought how stupid

He had been to put his poems in a plastic bag that felt like money.

 

[To be continued]