Time proved the meaningless end
to your simpering smile.
Staggering like a broken Marlon Brando, please
bound after this glory no more:
You are not my master
and I no longer your shiniest trinket.
Please just hush that voice; for all that
was brandished, your mythical idea of happiness
is now like listening to a paper slowly crumple.

I was just a pretty pout lost in a pose,
found in a bar we always never wanted to be in.
You swaggered then,
conceits of wealth shadowed you
like a burning cloud of locusts;
"With a lash of sun on your skin," you said,
"You'll be like a prince from the slums."
I read the lines of your frown, smoothing
the rough waves fringing your forehead
and bent like a willow to a glut of opportunity.

Life for me was like a face tense with doubt
and thoughts breathing beneath tears.
“For the young, it usually is,” you said.
Your words were doused in a silkworm river
and for you I let my hands be used as clay -
when you broke my body like aged bread
doubt, like my street justice years, bled away.

Seemingly the remedy for isolation, the thirst
for connection was discovered in the elaborate life.
As long as I kept my mouth moist and poised in event
of a tsunami of flashes, you needed me:
If love was concerned, I missed it during rehearsals
for every smouldering stare and strive for perfection.
Complain? I agreed with the secret whispers:
My world was the shit you were turning into fertiliser.

Soon your every cheap thrill of first-night sex lingered
like strands of broken cobweb or
the wondered mystery between my parted lips;
Between feeling like the mannequin shedding
bitter tears, I may have loved you if only you knew
why the withered omnipotence of my pout;
“I wanted to learn how to smile.”

So I long ago abandoned you to temptations --
buying drinks with rolled up notes for boys
substituting fame for attention, or good clothes --
for people are truly the worst addictions:
enticing is their debauchery, their love intangible
and often never venerated.
I was netting butterflies with plastic and wit,
but learning my mind into a satellite;
your status made inches in all of my glass ceilings.
We were engulfed in dark rooms inside our heads:
Why did you seek my hand for company rather than escape?

I cannot say I will miss sharing my bed
with your conga line of drunken angels;
or wandering aimlessly amidst grimy souls
under the mask of opulence;
or being endlessly introduced at the parties in
funny euphemisms for a jewel one plucked from dirt.
I will remember not every setback imparts wisdom
but marks of how we are all canvases
in the wheel of life's eternal turn.
“It was supposed to be enough,” you claim.
But, I decided, “For the young, never usually is.”

Those tears taste like lead, don’t they?
Oh, the ruptures of receding silver hair
cannot curtain those faded lush eyes.
You helped me expand my youth,
while you were routinely spent on folly.
I never wanted to waste my last breath on lies
and so to say I took you for what you were worth,
would imply you were really worth much at all.

Redemption and salvation are things wealth can‘t claim;
I am still who I was that night your elder charm
collected the lonely fibres of my innocence.
So are you, it transpires:
The King who never increased his influence.
And I’m so sorry,
but I belong in a different bar now.