S(hell)

Forty years is old,
too old to blossom
in enamel shells.
When spinning months
nobody is truly alive,
we crones
floating crisp with fallen leaves.

The trick to breathing
is to encase it in tin
before varicose veins
and shellshock arrive
to hijack the portrait.
The trick is dying
before memory casts a shadow.

Young creatures die quick
and cross over to welcoming fields
while bone festers in the sun;
flesh, a cheap cloak
worn away with age.
Life is not absolute
here on earthly mists
where human milk curdles by design;
shallow and fragile
this limited precursor.

Senseless fruit aged
by granite chapters
falling from wizened branches
into bedtime, medicine and coma.
These flecks,
blood fists of pulses
are boiled in hedonistic kettles,
prepared for life
without the cogs of weeks and years
and rumy waltzes...

Steven Francis poems 2009