DOGDAYS

DOGDAYS

Once more July has taken its toll. On motorway verges the dry grasses turn yellow. Trees, a week ago in their summer prime, grow tired and sparse. In Kensington Cemetery, half-glimpsed between thinning branches, the coloured slabs of flowers, still masking the new graves, wither and fade overnight. As July ends all things seem to mount towards some great, romantic climax; each hour promises to bear witness to its own, unique, never before permitted revelation. Then, in the stale twilight, we stagger from the pub, watch our piss froth like beer down ivied walls, having drunk our farewell drink to the summer of promise which has ended, like all the others, enmeshed in forking branches and dead leaves. ***************************

Always the ribs show nearer the skin. In bed at night emaciated finger-tips play, ever closer, to the white ivories. Almost as if

one summer more could jerk away forever the whole, mad, complex machinery of flesh and blood emancipate, crustacean-like, the hidden bone.