Crotchets and quavers clipped and piled high in an over spilling bun escape

in sun baked wisps. They lightly caress  pink dry skin, soft and smooth

to the touch.

 

Her eyes, washed out in blueness, sparkle when she laughs

and offer 40 watts when she does not.

 

While  eye-lashes hide twenty-four seven,  eye brows that met long ago

have been pencilled and plucked into surprised submission.

 

They work in tandem with thin white lips that gently form and reform

as she listens, as she microscopically shapes and reshapes  the words

in other people’s speech.

 

Her quick smile is my full stop.  She’s engrossed, bursting, ready and primed

to hear about the green-eyed alligator I discovered in the back garden.

For me to tell, to embellish upon facts that will never quite

arrive.

 

She Ooo’s  in my mid-sentence and her face tends towards the conical.

 

Her ears hang like pork chops, all flaccid and flexed on a left lobe tug of

anticipation.

 

I want to pinch her fleshy nostrils, pinch and release

her yellow worms,  pinch and release  and watch as they

wriggle free from their black-head bed. As they come rest upon

my finger nail.

 

The base of her neck is sacred; Yardley, Ponds, and misshapen bone.

 

Light down at the side and under her chin can be caught by the sun

but not by the tweezers. Last night one morphed into a spider’s leg,

it gripped close to the flesh and hurt upon nursing extraction.

It left behind watery eyes and a fresh red bump covered in beige.

 

When unobserved she sags, pink gravitates to grey and sadness

overwhelms her surprise. It nestles into well-trodden paths,

drawing tiredness and damp to the surface.