Sky of Bone, Land of Stone

I can’t write another poem.

That’s what I think sometimes

I’ve nothing more to write

Just another poem for another place

Another fizzing morning

After a noisy night

Alone in Edinburgh

In a hotel with Perspex walls

A drizzle of rain

After the hot southern cocktail

Sky of bone

Land of stone

I wander the streets

By chance I glimpse a lap dancer

Through through the open doorway

To an empty bar

She sticks out her tongue

In, what I imagined afterwards

As I walked the half-familiar streets,

A come-hither gesture

Using reverse psychology.

Sky of bone,

Land of stone.

Do you know what I fancy right now?

A cigarette. A roll up.

If I were on my own

And didn’t have a loving wife

Three hundred miles away

I could do that so easily

Embrace the deathly cocktail

of chemicals and carcinogens

drawn them into my lungs

My friend and I

We’d would walk out into the night, together

Beneath the bone sky

Into the land of stone

Into the dancer’s arms

My friend would glow

With the warmth of human contact

And the glow would finally die

And the wind would obliterate all traces

Of his soul, his dying breath

And I would toss his empty carcass

Into the road

And only his shadow would remain with me

In the land of stone

And then I’d want another friend