Desire

Desire paints a portrait limned in red
Each brush stroke makes the tendons ache
Scarlet daubs cannot express
Ideas that burn the heart like chilli
Rendered in the hues of slaughter
Exsanguined gallery of desire

The pale, lukewarm room
My paintings on the walls
Her beside me on the bed

Liking but not ‘loving’
There is no such pretence
Silent - and then too intense

Surrounded by phantasms
Sad pictures of enciphered emotion
She liked them tremendously

She showed them to her friends
They perceived a different young man
Strangers now - further apart than when we first began

Prefigured in those abstracts
Stone people: static dances
All art is fleeting

I demanded understanding
Playing an obscure and cruel game
Five years ago and yesterday: the same

The sister and the friend
Both miss my brand of strangeness
She thinks herself the villain / saint

My paintings all converged
Blurred by a final desperate kiss
Reduced, at last, to this:

“Oh, L------
You accuse me of having no feelings
As you crush them underfoot”

Self pity fades into boredom
I will never write that promised letter
‘The Sacred Manacle’ is not my fetter

The dull oblivion of vodka
The pointless, empty poems
The dialogues with my divided self

We did not actually say ‘goodbye’
A part of me has not left... we never met...
She has my paintings yet