Price of Love

(We are all trying to own something, no longer for sale).


You ask to come,
to talk to me
but have nothing to say
only something to sell.
There was a time, one brilliant year
forged with the intensity of desire
tempered only by fitful sleep
when we traded words,
special morsels, cherished by us both
each one a scent, a lacquer, saliva thin
licking each other until sated.
Now it’s a complicated alphabet
with garish prefixes,
suffixes that scratch,
each one priced with thinly disguised
labels of indifference.
How many you say?
How much I counter?


© Graham Sherwood 02/2015

Hippy in a Suit

(A reflection on the golden decade).


Such beautiful music and magical words,
1970 and I a pinstripe poet
living a three-piece life.
we weren’t afraid to show our bodies then,
peeling off our inhibitions with our clothes,
our emotions like the layers of an onion,
crying came easily, love easier still.


Our art, was more important than feelings,
being the broker of our relationships,
the chords and clever quips
twin sabres to slice our umbilical hearts,
but I never bled for long, cauterized
by the next Pied Piper, sweet of song
that bid me follow his tune.


So the beautiful entrancing babies
blossomed to become icons of the age,
I worshipped from a distance
and watched them butchered and drugged,
scarred by their greedy vicious muses,
lain stranded in a disappearing time,
they in Kaftans, me in a suit.



© Graham Sherwood 02/2015