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To the Weary

Bruised yellow and mauve, the colours of glued sunshine stuck to this saturated autumn, you haul your skin over the worn sinews of your flesh, wrap it around your buckled knees, smooth it over your swollen elbows.

Five, six, seven layers of crumpled paper you smooth over your cardboard bones. Used and useless, you caress the scars you call home. You scored your feet following a liar, loaned your tissue shoulders without fee until they ripped and tore, blistered your hands from palm to finger-tip picking up the fallen and carrying the heavy. That lump lodged between a right and wrong in your heaving chest is aching, aching for rest.

But, your lungs wheeze on, recycling air from another’s breath. You loosen your skin, stretch your fickle bones and wander on to another bed, another body, another bruise.