Saturday 7 June 2014

Bus note 96

Her forget-me-not shirt
gets sticky in breaking rain.
        Lattices of scars
        on lower arms
and rush job star scratches
on loose hung cheek:
        skin book
        of harm.
Dragonfly tattoo
looks penned on
with wrong hand
in thick vein blue.
        Steam fills
        in lenses.
The wet makes
red bare places.

2 comments:

  1. Very nicely observed.

    The truly terrible thing in this vision -- alas not all that uncommon any more -- is that they've actually got readers. A step ahead of us, in that respect (or would it be a prick and a poke?).

    I manage to get those red bare places without the "art". My body does not produce the kind of connective tissue required for healing. In the Trauma Unit, they finally had to summon the Head of Vascular Surgery, a very professional and careful older Indian woman, to "get a vein", so as to insert the fluids that enabled me to go on with a bit more of this awful being alive. It took her many a prick and a poke, at that.

    So I rank tattoos right up there with carbon emissions as signals of the lack of instinctive animal intelligence in an expiring species.

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  2. Thanks, Tom.

    I'm with you on the tattoos - they seem to be spreading like an apocalyptic plague.

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