Dissecting Keats

Come friend, let’s go to where it all began:
Where you eased the heart ache and eased the pain.


The window’s warm light, embering darkness.
The intoxicating sawdust sets the scene:
In succulent reds, butchers dress
With neat laced mince-trays trimmed by hedging green.

Strangers inveigled into its warm light,
All seduced by the still unravishing flesh.
All Senses aroused with intense delight
As dulled minds were made alive and fresh.


Mondays were butchery days, dreaming of distant lands:
Slicing, sawing and cutting endlessly.
A bitter chill froze fingers and clenched hands. 
Huge frozen livers numbed limbs tremblingly.

Your verse learned by heart pulsed through each red vein
As winter’s blackness cloaked the shop.
The brisket bones snapped and cracked like dry cane,
You in shadows hid, but whispered at each chop.


As lambs were routinely quartered and hung,
You were the voice that would never cease;
A poetic and melodious tongue
That among the strain and grind was at ease.

As blood red blocks were scrubbed with metal teeth,
My light spirit, you were my scarlet pain.
Buried deep, a green and living wreath, 
You were beauty in a joyous refrain.

The steep hill now drags home with black tarmac.
Even here fever and cold pinch and sneeze,
As the path is pebbled by winter rain,
I dream of Grecian art as my balls freeze.
Copyright © | Year Posted 2017

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Kimathi Avatar
April 8, 2017 at 4:44 AM
Greetings, Brian. Congrats for your placement in the contest!! ;-)
Duffield Avatar
April 8, 2017 at 8:29 AM
Thank you..but which contest was it again???cannot seem to find it?
Smith Avatar
March 31, 2017 at 11:38 AM
You would make him proud Brian, I love this...
Duffield Avatar
March 31, 2017 at 11:45 AM
Glad you like it. True..I was an apprentice butcher at 15 but was inspired reading poets like Keats..by heart. Fantastic. After night classes and college went to Newcastle University to study English by 19...intense...cannot manage that now!!
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