all the king's horses

there are all these people who
would like to think of themselves
as hopeless cases, the kind of
seashells who put up their own
window bars and yank the blinds
down when the light touches them
in inappropriate places, who tug
at the hems of their brand new
clothes and follow roads like
ribbons when it decides to stop
raining, when the lost summer
swallows its own tongue and they
fall into sandpits and set fire to
train tickets, half-masks, and paint
themselves into sloppy ovals using
cigarettes as the wands they could
wave and bring the darkness slinking
round the corner. their own necks cannot
hold their heads up or keep glistening
eyes open through the night, to leer at
pretty girls with lips that might taste
like vodka or like chapstick or like
the whole northern hemisphere had been
flooded, who might or might not have
sex with one two three purple clover
boys, who might talk to the owls who
are the only ones who really know the
smiles of the stars, which can be joined
like vertexes of limbs to scrawl names
and prophecies and promises in the
snowglobe of a sky. and there is no
glamour in the disintegration of a body,
in the nonsensical prayers of a heart
that can’t walk straight, in a world that
doubts the sun. traitors and musicians
with no bottles left hang like dressing
gowns on every street, burnt into tinges
of orange under lamps waiting just a
few decibels too long to wake up.
after six years in the mirror all the
ice has melted, all the stones have
fled to the bottom of their dirty boots
like somewhere in the silence there
is an answer nobody dares to look
full in the face. after all this has gone
and they are older and wiser and paler
than bones of elephants washed up
by the tide, when they are too lonely to
bother breathing anything other than
dust, the headphones they used to
cling to will mumble the same old
songs despite the whitewash of the
walls, despite the fact that all those
misguided courtiers have left their
love letters where they were scribbled
and won’t come home, not while the
fridges are humming and their fingers
are numb, bruised, sticky from the
fridays when all that mattered, with all
the king’s men, was trying to cement
the flakes of their vertebrae back into place.