And No-One Said A Word.

“What’s happening?”
The boy whispered through his fear.
A man with taciturn smile missed the single tear-
drop waiting, in the corner of his eye.
The blur of passing images
whisked the boy from his world,
into another.
Changed scenes, altered dreams.
He was delivered…
yet no-one said a word.

Not a word from mummy
who disappeared, fat and screaming with new life.
Not a word from ‘Uncle’ Tony
whose ugly spirit and heart full of scars
condemned the boy to a new life too.

He searches for familiars
snivelling snottily, licking the lip
where his mucus gathers.
He savours the salty secretion
while strangers suck wearily
at the inner life he conceals.
How does he feel?
No-one really wants to know.

Five long years of mother’s stress
crash into this chasm of loneliness
where white fanged rats of life
gnaw at his worth;
and he meanders on his splintered earth
a bedraggled, half-eaten survivor
of lonely horrors, to a place where
the boy no longer exists,
where neither wreckage nor beauty fits.
Where, in control of nothing
he wanders, dazed
and as his wonders flower dark;
a self-murderous temper frays
the edges of his deserted heart.

Angry eyes
learn first to plead
then disguise.
So the boy never cries
unless for gain, then,
tears fall like rain.
The boy ignores
the  need for sun
that after the deluge would
create a beautiful spectrum.

So, the shadows lengthened and
still, nothing is mentioned.
Silence as loud as cannon,
bible blackness – transparent, invisibility
washes over the boy as tides of woe.
Fury barely contained he
pushes aside any rainbow
that strains for the light which
could add colour to his laughter,
add glints and tints to his character.
add one day to his nights.

The man is never free from hurts.
Despite an insane hope for glory
he fumbles on a path less traversed
and stumbles toward his destiny
on the same road he took to avoid it.
So, through the game,
after all pretence and thrill,
his life still on pause
poised in the jaws of silence.
Breathless, expectant…
he waits still; for a word.