Light seeps through cracked lashes.

The new day’s tide sweeps a winter beach,

debris left on rippled sand

forms a room of furniture

in a head weighed with questions.

 

Out of frozen vaults of memory,

a canvas dragged into the morning sun

thaws slowly, mixed colour through frost

leaching out in blurred patches

on old bones in a strange bed.

 

Who owns these shoes on the floor,

the clothes laid over the chair?

Where has this body washed up,

dreams dissolving in net curtains

with each successive blink?

 

Untethered thoughts escape.

Faded pages, ripped from random chapters

of unfamiliar books,

float from shelves where a life story

drifts as lost flotsam.

 

Water ebbs from confused spaces,

muddle and recognition in a mismatch:

a struggle with half-remembered faces,

the salty dampness of the beach,

a name that will not come,

 

a stranger’s shoes by the bed,

cold waves breaking over the room,

someone’s clothes on the chair,

the sound of anxious breathing

and the backbeat of a pulse.

 

Picture credit: adapted from an original on Wikicommons by Nigel Mykura