Reflection at 27

Reflection at 27 And every night he returns, to look at me like no other, never bothering to alter his tiredness, or to mask his painful exhaustion. So, with kind intent I guide him, as he browses the powders and puffs, to decorate an emancipated face like his own exquisite corpse. In some routine fashion he visits, slight, slightly ill - in his trading of metallics for a bitter white. Alongside me now stand four others, assistants, artists and associates, double checking he’s up to scratch, yet remain unconcerned with his newfound emptiness, impartial to his fading frame. That same night, he returns, and alone he seems so sickly. Trying to plead and reason and justify what he’s made of himself. He told me, I never wanted to be one of them I didn’t want to end up like that I don’t want to die so young and I don’t break until he leaves to find solace in his new accomplice. The next year he visits, his body a passenger of a parasitic psyche. A shell of himself, who left his soul on the two snow white rails, as he moves from station to station, alive and well only in theory. This year he doesn’t see me at all. A newfound vacancy in his eyes, enveloped in distasteful glitters, this year the assistants check him twice, So that the streams that carve his face never leave a trace, So this year he’s happy for the naked eye. There’re no more visits, it’s in my nature to assume the worst, when we sung suicide, and I guided his hand from pen to piano to pick-me-ups. Only hoping the guilt of greed wouldn’t eat us alive. Years pass, and I'm reminded now and then of our Sweet Seventy-four, and of the man whose hand I held off the cliff’s edge. Our exchanged words became a ballad over the ten o’clock news. Our death seized the radio. Perhaps without my script, death would wait. He followed my lyrics as if he had written his own lethal fate, and acted as if it were a premeditated event, that his destiny was written in melody, not stars.

Reflection at 27 And every night he returns, to look at me like no other, never bothering to alter his tiredness, or to mask his painful exhaustion. So, with kind intent I guide him, as he browses the powders and puffs, to decorate an emancipated face like his own exquisite corpse. In some routine fashion he visits, slight, slightly ill - in his trading of metallics for a bitter white. Alongside me now stand four others, assistants, artists and associates, double checking he’s up to scratch, yet remain unconcerned with his newfound emptiness, impartial to his fading frame. That same night, he returns, and alone he seems so sickly. Trying to plead and reason and justify what he’s made of himself. He told me, I never wanted to be one of them I didn’t want to end up like that I don’t want to die so young and I don’t break until he leaves to find solace in his new accomplice. The next year he visits, his body a passenger of a parasitic psyche. A shell of himself, who left his soul on the two snow white rails, as he moves from station to station, alive and well only in theory. This year he doesn’t see me at all. A newfound vacancy in his eyes, enveloped in distasteful glitters, this year the assistants check him twice, So that the streams that carve his face never leave a trace, So this year he’s happy for the naked eye. There’re no more visits, it’s in my nature to assume the worst, when we sung suicide, and I guided his hand from pen to piano to pick-me-ups. Only hoping the guilt of greed wouldn’t eat us alive. Years pass, and I'm reminded now and then of our Sweet Seventy-four, and of the man whose hand I held off the cliff’s edge. Our exchanged words became a ballad over the ten o’clock news. Our death seized the radio. Perhaps without my script, death would wait. He followed my lyrics as if he had written his own lethal fate, and acted as if it were a premeditated event, that his destiny was written in melody, not stars.by Laurence K

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