Art

Trash Prince Poems – Miles Coombe

 

HEAT

 

He is the residual ache in your soul

Maybe it is enough to anchor me

This heat makes me gasp for air

 

The days are dragging into one

Fuelled by careless whispers

Even the sun is yawning

 

Red behind his eyelids

He can’t remember why you abandoned him

Fading dust in the summer light

 

Stifling warmth slows everything down

Time crawling like a Sunday afternoon

Memories etched in pastel colours

 

The world keeps on coming in without asking

I feel like a ghost in this heat

Like melted glass under an indifferent sun

 

Just like the stories from your childhood 

Flowers grow inside him

Please make it all mean something

 

The scorched ground is so hard

We are all alone in the blessed silence

Petals wilting in the solid air

 

These journeys take us far from home

You were just wishing for the end of pain

Bruised clouds gathering overhead

 

Some things can never be made right

There is change on the horizon

The air smells like rain

 

Pupils wide as the summer sky

Hands clasped in the sweat of early evening

Choking on our prayers

 

The very last rays of sun upon your face

Let’s build a blanket fort in the living room

Our blood will stain each other’s hands

 

Sometimes you will find it hard to keep going

But you will anyway

Watching the stars burn out on your way home

 

 

BLIGHT

 

At night we dream of birds on fire

Late nights with a touch of nostalgia

The ache of adolescence 

The sound silence makes in a vacant house

 

At night we dream of road kill on a leash 

And thin, crumbling windows

Repressed narrative arcs

Inadequate scrapings of memory

 

In daydreams we are the blood eaters

It tastes of foxgloves and bone marrow

Lingering on the lonely concrete

Starved of meaning, weakened in the sunlight

 

We paint over the mould on the wall

It looks as good as new

But the blight is still there underneath

Rotting  

 

 

WHITE

 

The boy is clothed in feathers

Little white bird, freckles on his cheeks

Tender flesh showing old bruises

Demented from the mania of the thought of growing up

 

Ringlets of hair brushing his neck

Showing fresh scars with pride

He wears a skull like a crown 

Nothing good will come of this

 

The land sends messages of hook and claw

Patron saint of youth and rage

He carries our sin into the wilderness

Obsessive prince of his very own playground

 

To save himself from the horrifying ordeal of being known

He steals the souls of lost children 

This brazen vessel of murderous fixation 

You are the only witness to his violent crimes

 

He is the Lord of dreams and unfulfilled prophecies

At night the full moon burns under flowers bathed in blood

In the place where the clouds end

His cries of loneliness keening into the dark

 

Second star to the right and straight on til morning

His is the land that borders your creeping sadness

He waits outside all the open windows

Praying on fabled stories told by damaged mothers

Many seasons have passed

The air grows thick with dust

The windows are now closed and he is all but forgotten

Entropic decay battles with numbing sameness

 

You have grown and yet he is still the same

Sick little bird, clothed in white feathers

Trapped in his own make believe

Forever