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The View of Anthony Hepplethwaite 2013

With a little tightening round the waist 
the skinny day comes out to taste the 
fatness of the light
I am in sight of something great but I’m hungry,
cannot wait
so I make my move too soon
and am swallowed in the craters of a Moon so cold
so very, very old with its yellow hardened crust 
that would lead me into desperation with gnarled hands 
and beard and face as red as any rust 
turned into dust
I would become
the dying of a dying sun
no matter fat or thin or if I wore a belt or braces
the many faces I would see
would only ever face the end of me.

I try to modify this future that only I can see by praying to a God I can’t and never did
I wonder if that God is hid among the craters on the Moon and was it that he made his move too soon?
If so,
we’ll have much to muse upon as we wonder where our lives have gone
and would he tell me how to live or would he give a eulogy
prepare me for that long journey?

I’ve come ten million stars through another thousand corner half lit bars where girls would sell me ballerina dreams that danced for me on spotlight screens and how could everything that seemed so real
be whisked away?

The spinning wheel came to a stop and zero popped up on the marker board where rich men whored their eminence
and all pretence was stripped away,
any other day the Lords that lorded over us would break up parliaments and owls would hoot and say,
Wit and to whom would we deliver it?

A bit of eccentricity, electric elementary educationalists get me fired up again as if I ever learned from them old men with old ideas whose only thoughts were to get young men up off their rears and into wars,
more whores who sold a bill of lading to trading partners who shot us down in front room parlours on council housing states of minds.

A kind of beauty in this fractured glass where through osmosis I can pass but not pass away only into some other uneventful day.

I lay my tortures on your brow
you know how to soothe this pain 
before I go off scale again and read a riot act to those,
where those who have lain their lives in dirty fields and 
barn houses full of hay
would have me say,
that we should not have to live this way.

In the craters on the Moon
I see that all is all too soon and will always be
another eulogy is read
for the dead undead who do not know
that here is where we are
there’s nowhere left to

Copyright © John Smallshaw | Year Posted 2018

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