slow bleed on a blistered bench

slow bleed on a blistered bench

Old man on the blistered bench,
who did you used to be?
What music filled the night when
you first latched a heart and kept it?
What pleased your tongue when
you knew the full power of human pleasures?

Old man on the blistered bench,
stares through the world that moves around him.
He is there, under paling folds of skin and milky eyes;
a man of a different world, ensnared inside
a peeling husk that smothers him lazily.

He is innocent; like his hands have never known
the slippery slick of smeared blood or
the dirty sting of muck in cracked skin.
His voice has never been more than a raspy whisper and
he is sexless, chaste as a country priest, despite issue.
And, when he clears his throat, we wait silent,
assuming wisdom or confession, until
he goes back to his quiet, his intentions
swarmed by birdsong, shrieking children, muddled traffic
and the kindly looks of those who deign to see him.

Old man, what have you seen?
What terrors and feats pulse still
beneath that reptilian skin of yours?
Tell me of your golden hair, blue bottle eyes and
swimmer’s build and I’ll look to find you.
Tell me of a lover’s clutch, a friend you would have died for,
an enemy you stopped with panicked design,
and I will sift through the wreckage to find a hero.

Oh, those poor unfortunates; those unripened souls
claimed by exotic disease and romantic tragedy,
their young bodies shred and strewn like confetti
on the swaying grass of a distant year.
You, the deft survivor, were the blessed one,
fated to be dismantled only by the slow bleed of time.

All the pretty wasted ones who went with smooth skin,
leaving petal-lipped darlings, are remembered,
worshipped even, though their inferior bones have gone to dust.
Their stories still provoke a doleful shake of the head,
leaving the survivor to die slowly for years and years,
re-living every death and every face veined with tears.

The champion labours to breathe on a bench
that sits beside a humming street.
His name, the only thing to distinguish him from
the other crumbling faces that dot the weekday sidewalk,
and any claim on sensational sorrow has been forfeited,
leaving him to some peaceful bedtime death
brought on by sacred fingers.

There, on the bench, though his tongue
has long since lost its reason,
he tastes something faintly sweet on the air,
something soft and lenient: divine salvage.
He has tasted it before, but had then thought it bitter, and
only now does he silently welcome the budding hunger inside.
Old man merits no medal, and only has the faintest grip
on the moments that have given him reason.

He knows this as he passes time under a grey morning sky,
occasionally looking up for crashing birds,
straining to hear the calls of phantom dead men;
all who knew him, all who would have died to save him
grateful that they are gone, that they cannot interfere.