No-One Returns Borrowed Books, Ever Poem by John J Doyle

Though perhaps death may share the blame -

I fail to accept logic, reason, sorrow as excuses;

my Herman Melville, my Readers Digest Guide to Better Gardens,1972,

are these merely bystanders to a shard of sudden stroke that bites the

lives from a clutch of barbed-wire chests,

that flinch at the snap of slipping bone

on the shiny tiles of clickety-clack suburban homes - white wine everywhere?

No, I believe not.

I peer through the tortures of whipped-tight blinds,

of lights ashamed to be clothed in the scarlet sins of red,

I see my pile, and they see me, the bridge of death and darkness

ropeless in-between;

Jump I say, jump I tell them, perhaps they'll die too,

my curtain's love for glimpsed and clutched

street-lamp light

as wordless and un-edited as ever