Ophelia By Lucy Arnold

As a daughter of the inner city circus, I find sleep too quiet. I lie beneath the same wasted sky that moans and breaks in two, the same sky as the night before. It watched me lose consciousness upon my bedroom floor. In silence it watched you too. At home as you carved your name again and again in strange words on dead trees. You speak my language better than me. I knew he wasn't English as he spoke it much too well.

Lying on my floor waiting for sordid language and leering to announce its presence through empty ringing on the crystal display. The clumsy pawing of an adolescent boy. Well meant, ill met and seldom remembered. Hips digging into old carpet and only the rain to break the silence. An old line in an old song we can't remember how to sing. A slow guitar seeps through my walls. Rhythm section - my slow breathing lazy heartbeat. Your lake fills with water in my head as the rain spits through the open window. I see you drifting above black water, hair forms a darkened halo around your face.

The face I've seen so many times, so many angles, well lit or blurry with alcohol and emotion. So many times. Scratched in pencil on paper at your most beautiful. You, drowning in summer rain rendered mute by traffic and benign by songs. I wouldn't bear it. But enough of idle metaphorical drowning. Dirty water is still a baptism. I'd be your baptism of fire I think. A promise you won't let me keep. Have you noticed how we sleep? The long good night is such a cliché now the thunder is dead. You won't drown and I won't sing and we'll both sleep rough in our own beds. Alone. But you see how we will make the night. How we wake to see our little lights alive.

Copyright ©2005  Lucy Arnold

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