Hangover Square

The heat curled in the cold white air,
among flakes of paint and the warm feelings there,
and the sine-hum smiles that cycled in flight,
under sparkles of sunlights that rained down that night,
but something was wrong, to me, something felt flat,
like a cardboard love, or a painted gaze;
like the fog of hope's corpse had exhaled in a maze,
yet it all looked so perfect, and clean,
like chrome.
And nice.
And pleasant, chatty and close.
To the external observer the scene was well,
but somewhere inside a sick seed of stone,
tiny and hard and cold and dead
and gripped like a fist, like a microscoped strangler
to colour the view to a grey-tinted red,
to a nothing-hued taste of dust,
the smell of a vacuum coughing fine rust
in an icicle void of wet black-hole space.
It all looked beautiful but something died in that place.

© Mark Sheeky. Permission is required for reproduction.