Mick Imlah - Past Caring

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Past Caring

As a ship
Sees only the tip
Of the ice's pyramid
That has already scraped her bows,
We'd glimpsed that drink was something you overdid;
Now after the wreck I sift the damage you'd stowed in the house.

Eyes glazed
I fumble, amazed,
Through mounds of knickers and slips,
Extracting the bottles you'd buried there; these
I hump in their binbags, clashing against my knees
To the 'bottle bank', by the public baths; it takes four trips.

The gin!
No wonder you're thin;
Hundreds of bottles of gin;
And feeding them singly into the ring
My arms grow weary from shifting the bottles of gin;
A numbing collection of lots of exactly the same thing.

You were vain
As you went down the drain;
Why else would you lay up this hoard
If it wasn't one day to take stock as I'm doing
Of what an almighty amount you had taken on board?
And here I am turning your trophies to scrap at an illicit viewing!

A smear
Of lipstick, here -
Like the kiss on a valentine;
And sniffing the neck I feel suddenly near to you,
For what it gives off is your smell, if we kissed any time,
And it wasn't a cheap perfume - but the only thing properly dear to you.

Next week
If you're not past caring
They may let you out for an airing,
To slump in your armchair, too burgled to speak,
The fish out of water that stubbornly stays all the more fish:
Then how shall we drag the treasure you were back to the surface?

Comments

[brttvns.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this immensely - thank you for sharing.

[lungsandsyrup.livejournal.com]

this was absolutely wonderful and also funny (but that may be just my weird humor)


thanks :)