To Paint This Picture
To paint this picture
I’m going back sure,
10 years to 21
Young man
Inexperienced
Just having fun
A fumble
Previously just
A friendly touching of bum.
She, she was otherworldly
Blond, Ukrainian
No head wreath worn
Warm though she was
My sunflower.
Anya her name.
Yeah and we’d tarried for about six weeks
May as well have been Aíne
The Celtic goddess of love.
On this precipice,
No peer pressure for me.
I was ready to bid adieu to hesitation,
Tired of being my own master of bation
The fear of blindness gone.
It was time to open my eyes.
To see…
Hands and parts enfolding, us tasting sex,
Mist lifting, vapors entwining.
No need for cupid, caldrons,
Cherry blossom puns, pheromones,
God’s of love, my devilish angle
Sent from above,
Had clouded my mind.
Where I mistook sheer lust as love.
Her my pillion passenger
On back of moped.
As I sped
From Crumlin to Tallaght,
Blessed by gods
Hallelujah,
At our arrival
My home empty.
As others holidayed
We relaxed, swayed
To the music,
Breathing in the air,
Album Moonlight Safari
Playing in background.
Track 2 Sexy Boy
Track 3 All I Need…
‘Remember’ ‘You make it easy’
Lucky lyrically it was all coming together…
Then, scenario!
A hitch,
No protection a barrier.
So on toe to the local,
The jacks, the Jonny machine,
And bingo.
Just a foreplay stumble
Rectified by some uttering,
A mumble.
And it became time.
We weren’t spooning,
We fit like Lego building,
Where between her legs I go,
Enveloped, just as much as entering
The forbidden flesh.
Touching with eyes closed,
Letting go to childish ways.
An offering,
In parts.
My heart,
Not knowing anything like this before.
It was all-good,
Sure, time goes backwards
On these waters.
And crash, and waves, on seas.
‘Le Voyage de Penelope’
I’d hoped I’d be her Ulysses
Yet I was still blind
To eventual probabilities…
Until.
Ne me quitte pas,
Ne me quitte pas.
You left, me,
Heartbroken.
We’d planned to do
So many things together
My sunflower.
You told me,
Your favorite painting was
Pablo Picasso’s ‘Still Life with a Mandolin’
It’s said to be a night scene, in which a fruit dish, bottle and mandolin are displayed on a table covered by a white-striped red cloth. All the objects are painted in a rhythmic and balanced order with lush plain colors and different pattern motifs.
For a few years after our night scene
I’d go to the gallery, thinking of our exhibition,
I’d sit there for up to an hour staring at this image.
There is a copy of it on the wall,
Of my childhood bedroom now.
Hanging,
Since.
While we may not have been picture perfect,
that moment I was captured.
I came back home.
To open dusty shoeboxes,
And unveil dusty memories,
For this poem.
And as time has passed, the thing that stands out most
In my mind is the letter you left behind the following morn.
The one in which you simply said,
I “Looked so beautiful while sleeping”
And if that is the memory you too have
From the fruits of our labour.
I’ve no regrets,
No regrets,
At all.
(For RTÉ 2 Reality Bites TV show ‘Like A Virgin’)
