It’s never easy meeting a fallen kindred spirit, their face reflecting your soul
For those who look
You can see the mirrored minutae of you
Often I feel they’re unseen, we all stuck looking for the reflection of our Facebook self.
A glossed fiction unfound in others unfounded in reality.
Still I see myself in the fleeting gloss of your lonely eye.
It like the an old friend who once looked upon me.
Unsolicited
really that’s the only type of honesty there is.
A compliment bubbling through the lips of admiration.
un-tinged by the cynicism of self benefit.
Do I say thanks enough?
To those who do what I’ve come to expect.
To those who meet my assumptions, and fulfill my needs.
I wave a soon forgotten thanks
to those paused at the zebra crossing
allowing me to just catch the tram I would have just been late for.
My friends and family, bastions of support and love,
I see you,
even if my words do not reach your ears.
Perhaps I do not give enough meaningful thanks,
as I applaud my own hard work’s achievements.
But I’d be floored without your outstretched arms, your words
repairing my ego raising a coy smile.
Perhaps I shy away,
to give thanks is to admit a weakness, a vulnerability
healed by another’s words and actions,
a naked appreciation masked in a mini shame.
And so I’d like to thank you Ashley,
for all you’ve done
doing nothing special at all.
We were perched on the walls lip, down stream from the hipsters smoking working-class DIY cigarettes,
sipping prosecco.
The Regent’s Canal reflecting the last light of the day.
“This reminds me of the Congo, ” Wilfried starts.
“But I used to see dead bodies there”.
I remember you from a former life,
from a track
ran by road-youths.
before adult reality’s claxton,
screamed our cease.
In my mind I still
Visit you.
We never drifted.
There was no loss,
no flood of blood,
washing away your innocence.
The crook of her mother’s brow
shapes her earth toned world view,
reducing glitter to dust.
Grains of sun flee her eyes,
washed away
rhythmically lapping at her cut glass cheeks.
Each breath, drawing in a fearfully rose future;
fragile desires dashed
within her insecure moods.
Her palms gasp – parched.
Feet unmoved from where she stood
when she first said hello.
Past midnight,
come the hours of calm.
Where the ether is still,
still enough to see its reflection.
Minds and fingers twitch,
the heady rush of this world’s
many tempting deaths, abandoning reality,
in return to the cold sobriety of the bedroom ceiling.
An alternate version of the poem “Union”.
For those I spent time with at the IOE.
*****
Our time dims twilight as our course draws to a close.
We forecasted a spring never-ending, sharing in optimistic lies, wishing on an unlikely future forever together.
Though together we have blossomed into a family.
My eyes finally prized open.
The judgmental clock face
shows me pm, and half a day
unconscious departed.
The morning now purely theoretical,
the sun half way passed,
before I’ve spoken my first word,
or taken my morning coffee
As a newborn, blanketed in last night’s haven
I stroll,
through the social threads
of this already passed morning.
J.C. FitzDerick 