Dee Rimbaud - It's Friday And They Don't Send Flowers Anymore

It's Friday And They Don't Send Flowers Anymore

It’s Friday and they don’t send flowers anymore. There is no opening in this door:

just a punched hole of perspex, warm and smoky against my cheek. I see...

A void of chequered floor, an empty corridor, no-one allowed to visit anymore.

No more tripping of days in a blind haze of city streets, high on the secretions

of forbidden adrenal glands. No more soft-centred clapping of hands.

No more passes for the day. And all for my own good, they say.

Would that I were past caring: past wanting to share in the mad rambling circus

of life... would that I could resign to a life confined: would that I could endure,

but their pharmacology cannot affect a cure.

Yesterday, I ran helter-skelter, naked as a baby, all the way down the high street:

handing out fistfuls of fivers to any woman I saw with sad brown eyes:

any woman who looked like you.

I am burning my wings, my beautiful angel wings. The flames are carmine,

scarlet, vermilion and crimson: hot as painted canvas; raw and violent

as unreciprocated dreams.

There are shadows within the shadows. The ward is filled with shadows;

and I am kept awake thru’ the pre-dawn hours. The lithium, they say, is ineffectual.

I am unresolved: their science, a library of undifferentiated symbols.

I cannot sleep. The blood rubs rough against the thin walls of my arteries: a skein

of chemicals, devoid of volition, simmering in a gurgle of de-oxygenated agitation.

I smoke too many cigarettes. The nicotine clogs up, but does not dissolve,

the acid salts beneath this skin. I am too thin: these protruding bones,

a too prominent intimation of my mortality.

Autumn winds blow rusted leaves past the ward windows. Pensioner women wear

poppies and think about dead lovers. And every time I close my eyes I see your face.

There is too much time for remembrance: not enough television to confuse

the senses. I hear a sad trumpet. The queen lays down a wreathe

in the blue flickering light. Summer is a closed door.

It’s Friday... and they don’t send flowers anymore.

Return to Main Menu