Suburban Decay

Confronted by slow sailing clouds,

spinning their sun softened silk,

Nostalgia’s hand pulls me under,

to a teenage dream.

I am the bravest introvert,

the reluctant extrovert,

pulled into action,

only by the delusion of destiny.

Maybe I’d be happier,

if I was without devotion?

But I am partisan to your mythological beauty,

turning Aphrodite’s tides green,

a jealous algal bloom,

foaming on the sands of heavy eyelids,

you come alive.

Who was I to love you?

With your pastel pink hair,

light as a sunbleached petal.

The way I chased your every breath,

and the way you looked at me,

shutting each of my organs off.

How ashamed I could be;

tearing at the fabric of my being,

to find a fibre that could be deserving of you.

Oh I know you could never love me from the pedestal I placed you on,

but we were sixteen.

So instead, I fabricated our romance in ink,

lending hope a home.

Now your touch is but a dream.

A hellish rapture of what if’s,

facetious visions of impossible futures.

Who did we become?

Here I still feel you,

embraced in the tangled streets of some european town,

staring down the barrel of a cigarette,

silence pierced only by an espresso shot,

colliding with a porcelain plate.

I would palm through poetry,

reading stray lines,

my half-baked rhymes.

And your sun kissed lips would part, 

for your encouraging smile.

There we would reside,

our story unheard,

two hearts content,

in their handwritten world.

-Rob Padfield