"Like Dust: Part 1"

This poem has been selected for publication in The Hyphen Literary and Art Magazine.

“Like Dust: Part 1”

Like dust

On an old man’s sweatersweatersweatersweater

Had it so many years

It’s seen so many things,

Mostly closets.

Buttons buttoned in better times,

Lithe young bones set right

In place.

Disjoint feel-joint conjoined lives,

Now she’s gone.

But her perfume he can still faintly smell on the lapel,

Young, beautiful, out of control,

A pipe with sewage and sparkling water bursting

With love they held each other in the evenings,

Sweetly,

Sweetly.

Six pence for a pie, sir,

But no one uses pence or pennies anymore.

Soon, he thinks, I’ll be the dust on a sweater,

No more, no less, for worse or better,

He’d recited his vows backwards,

Like love had come dyslexic through his teeth

Conjoin, our loins

In holy matrimony.

He puts the sweater on his back

Aching, aching, stoop like turtle

It’s warm, it smells of her,

It makes him feel a little bit younger.

Old man with a head full of memories going to black

Head-set with a bald head and no tattoos,

Though he’d thought of getting one when he met her,

Foolish boy.

Foolish man?

Finding his woman in a sweater he hasn’t worn in fifteen years!

Nostalgia worsens with age, they say,

Just like your back.