Leftovers and Sellotape

Christmas is sticky
Mincemeat, onion marmalade,
and past year's echoes.

Eyes half closed

Which squint sees it right -
two faces, or the candle?
Either way, it burns.

One line

Simple, the circle

Describes us but two concepts

Within and without

Lucy P

Lucy P - the graffiti says - is 2-faced

She emblazoned her name on the subway wall,

Bubblegum pink and rebellious as kittens

But then came the footnote,

A snide attack

A miserable scribble, daubed in black

No credit to the author.

Christmas Eve, 1995

The hillside was silver and cold.
Snow by starlight should be beautiful,
and it was;
but the bitterness of its beauty
recalled my chattering teeth,
so I looked down to the village instead.

That valley was too narrow for us both to be.
You could be; I could be.
But we could not.
So we huddle-froze up on the mountain, inseparable.
Damned the spying eyes
and held close.

From such a distance,
the golden-syrup streetlight glow
clung viscously around
the village houses and walls
every deep shadow a fleck in amber
Essentially unchanged
for a hundred years

We swore we'd not fossilise;
but love fiercely
and change,
and grow
and we did.
That's the pain of it.
We breathed our teen promises,
nose to nose,
watched them freeze into clouds;
hang, swirl and dissipate.