Joe Bakes

 

If you love me, nay, if you even like me, where are you now?

(A pair of poems to be read simultaneously by 2 voices)
 
1: I watch a frail, light-brown leaf descend from
2: I see the night-time demise of a great
1: A spotted limb, before a pale blue sky.
2: Airship, that once soared magnificent and
1: It arcs through invisible curves drawn like
2: Proud; and now it slowly slides, its nose turned
1: Construction lines to mark the movement of
2: Towards inevitable muddy fate.
1: All things. A gentle breeze blows and the leaf
2: Roaring flames devour the great balloon from
1: Begins to turn and twist, contorted by
2: The tail, relentlessly tearing rubber
1: The swift moving air, until it comes to
2: Skin from a frail mechanical skeleton.
1: Rest beside a small child, upon a cold
2: A dynamic, living gargantuan
1: Stone step. the child playfully picks up the
2: Reduced to ash and an architect's sketch
1: Leaf, and begins to pull at delicate
2: The ribcage deflates, one final breath.
1: Brown skin, exposing bony veins, no more
2: The passengers are forgotten, consumed
1: Than the branching skeleton of a leaf.
2: By the fiery carcass and the night.
1: And so he lays down his carcass, clothed in
1 & 2: Only fragments, shards, of fragile skin.

 

 

Joe was commended in the Foyle Young Poets 2007

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