Jonathan Butcher - Two Poems

Our Last Walk

 

Under the shadow of that imposing grey mass of steel

and concrete, we make the drink filled promises of ill

thought out reunions, that never for a sober minute

would ever be considered rational.

 

Your fingers clamped to the cigarette papers, now slightly

aged and cracked, your wit now seems cut with the weakest

substitute, just like your powders; diluted beyond recognition

and you assumed we didn't notice.

 

That scar upon your left cheek that you would finger when

making a point, the bottle circulating next to your knee.

We would pray for an encompassing silence, to stifle the

fear drawn from your credulity.

 

The bruises left on rib cages like rain stained rose petals,

answered any question asked incorrectly, but we have now all

caught up with your withered expectations, but under this warming

sun now even your shadow looks old.

 

 

 

Obvious

 

On that beach after last orders, the damp sand remaining

stable under our intoxicated feet. That smile of yours as

brittle as the shattered shells beneath our heels, the broken

homes of now long excluded occupants. 

 

It had taken an age it seemed to reach this pinnacle, like a

gapping wound that was never stitched and left to turn septic.

I now bask the clichéd result that was promised for so many

decades and was now slowly delivered.

 

To seek an end seemed superfluous, to take advantage of

those Friday night vows which were welded together like

rusted chains, and to pass them through the loop of a paper

ring that tears at the first spot of rain.

 

We stagger up the concrete steps in cold, bare feet; your laugh

now as dark as the boarded-up shop fronts on the horizon. Any

light now completely absorbed, and as you move forward for

that last kiss, I stub my toe for the second time.  

 

 

 

Jonathan Butcher has had poetry appear in a wide range of online and print publications, including: Electric Windmill Press, The Rusty Nail, Belleville Park Pages, Dead Beats, Underground Voices, Gutter Eloquence, Dead Snakes and others. His second chapbook 'Broken Slates' has been published by Flutter Press. He lives in Sheffield, England.