Remembering, a soft whisper through a canal of three tiny bones
Drumming along the black corridor, and a man with a key
Locking a child he was unfamiliar with in her room
Telling her to go to bed while he screwed her mother over a ditch
With greasy Cypriot hair and forks for eyelashes
Prising her open with his eye tool and charm

Absent from this optical art game, I sat in an envelope bed
Hammering to defeat sheets, glued down,
Shredding the skin from my lip
Decaying in desiccated summer, moving in palm whispers; swinging -

onto a hook, drawing red paint balls from my mink fur
And mindlessly throwing them into the ditch
Drowning out the sounds of sweet nothings
Watching their bodies of soft tissue, whisper along the waterway
A secret “You must never tell”

01/25/2004

Author's Note: I did tell my father, 10 years later.

Posted on 01/25/2004
Copyright © 2025 Sam Roberts