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She had been beautiful once, but her skin
was now dry: starched parchment, heavily lined
and deeply scarred by her mind’s constant weathering.
A glimpsed aspect caught like torn cobwebs.
Her bloom had drained into deep crevasses,
as she stumbled between relationships.
The birthdays were the same, only the names changed:
dancing in squalls of letters and littered lives.
Within the plastered make-up and set smile,
a distant, hollow drum beat away the silence
of enveloping walls. Yesteryears’ cards propped up,
hung out: semaphores of grounded memories.
Guided positions had too often ended
in rubble: sad wreckages that had clogged up
highways and low ways of conducting journey’s end.
The mascara too often hid the steely look.
She had basked in summer fluttering: heady days
of buff-orange, loitering in shrubs and copse,
which, sadly, led to the pricks of thistles
and nettle stings distant from dock leaves.
The moon-cool Venus with the glossed lipstick,
cheap perfume and waft of loneliness,
had passed through her chrysalis of time:
no longer in the glad rags of dust-laden dreams.
ainted Lady
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