Are you sorry now?
Cowlicked
Sallow youth
Fingering the dried sheets
Of childhood
Painted manouschka 
Could you know
The first hallilullah?
Fused life
As you sat with well worn magazine 
Mopping up what’s left
Wheeling out of butcher’s theatre
Give the cigarette girl
A penny….. so she
Doesn’t bend in two for the muscled drummer
Who plays the same record throughout a long night
Testing her tightly strung strings
With bitten thumbs 
Let her know
The birth of understanding 
Comes not in filling empty bottles
With crawling dark
But something of the learned
Depth of solitude
Dying out imprints 
Like stretched skins behind glass
Look forlorn