Juliet Half-Pint

I'll be away again for a week, so make sure you give me lots of nice advice and nasty criticism to come back to.

Love you all, etc etc blah blah blah. Don't burn the place down while I'm gone.


JULIET HALF-PINT

Like waking to find your lover with half a face,
bloodless and blinking oddly in the morning light
of offices and turnstiles, questions and queries
that leave you stripped of what they call 'fun'
in this neck of the woods: necking in the woods
after closing time, last orders before you wake
to a chance encounter with a stranger you know
a little too intimately for you own good;
planning discreet days out to the chemist
on Fifth Avenue, stealing precious moments
in a backroom toilet with your fears.

Once, when Juliet was busy killing herself
with a half-pint of misery-drowning cider,
she chanced upon her handsome Romeo again:
man in a million to eyes as blind as hers,
spilling out those poppycock poppy-tears on me
with tales of nights and fights and break and makeups
washed clean for every new leaf to turn belly up
on pulsating passion and hot, wet glory nights
spent fucking the life out of hatred in your car
with nothing as pure as rain to wash your windshield.

Take back the night the walls proclaim, graffiti-bright
and never knowing that dark is for a day,
but gloom is for a lifetime.