She turns her head sideways
revealing lost beauty and long founded pain.
And far beneath that lunar landscape,
among the stones of cheeks and bones,
etched with pale fire that dims and glows,
is the shadow of a man who lost his way in life
and left a legacy which sucks and bubbles
as it creeps, seeping, steeped in disappointment;
still thinking, as he dips his brush in idle thought,
that he can steam clean and peel away the grime;
scrape out the layers of care driven like dirt
deep into the seams and turn back time.