In days now distant, we were one floor up, apartment dwellers
whose viewless windows revealed to us more than the darkness
that tried to appeal to us. Tambourine Therese tapped her tunes
of truths not yet tasted, tumble leaves freshly fallen from the trees
in the apple orchard of golden greens begging to be bitten into.

We were eager-eyed innocence yet to be broken by the blue;
scavengers, seeking the scent of salvation on the shiny streets,
saving up to buy beginnings to cut cords on. Mitchell as muse,
we were lyrics yet to be licked and covering Carey and cases
of whoever might come calling on the Casio in a little corner,
salivating for suggestions to rise in us seductions and thirsty
for tattoos to plot paths along our pale pinkness so as to track
our trajectory while singing in the ignorance of our sweet sorrow.

Sweet birds of youth busy building nests in confines of concrete,
too blind to the battery, we were born for the bloom but forging
a forever on a friendship that failed like the lie of a lead balloon.

In days distanced from all that was once dream, I’ve found form
as lonely painter on this canvas of winding words, a connoisseur
of cutting cords, often curt and callous, in the challenge to manage
the malice and learning to be fateful only to the fate that awaits
but caught at times, by the complicated cords that cannot be cut.

I hear you on the wind sometimes, tapping those tunes I thought
this body had forgotten with its skin no more so pink, so fresh.

The fruit fades but we find ourselves then reformed into fractures
of what once was, frail fragments unfinished, like filigree too fine
to unfold, like a dance as yet undone or a song we had still to sing
in this city I once returned to while moving on, slipping forward
through shadows passing, still building nests, still seeing better
in the darkness and touched, in that half-light, by the purity
of your sprite, once so fair, one so rare. We fell so fast
to finished and yet, as she sings of those songs like tattoos,
I’m reminded of that one flight up that can never be diminished.

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

This month is about looking back at all that cannot be forgotten.

We will always have Paris, it appears…