Empty Bottles


Bloodshot eyes flooded with once-hidden fears,
her tracksuit jacket pulled close around her,
securing her what little warmth remains.
But it escapes like those cold, stinging tears

over colouration not from a shop:
The blue swelling beside thick black lashes.
Searching the abyss – her vodka-and-coke –
She sees her true youth fizzing to the top.

His tattoos, fresh, cheap, are blurred from the booze.
A girl approaches him, with all the grace
– she thinks – of a nymph, floating, bare and spaced.
Out come lines, distorted, breaking her ruse.

Smoky, snake-like tongue, caressing with force
the top of a bottle of Lambrini.
What the drunken Adonis doesn’t see
is his wife, a mother and a divorce.