Ash

In the smouldering of a log,
is all the trapped energy
of a stifled scream, or at least 
it’s how it seems to me, 
in the eye-rubbing lateness
of this Whisky,
in the delayed reaction 
of what you said to me, 
or rather shouted,
over the revving of the engine,
as your cigarette butt, smouldering too,
and redolent of the taste of you
bounced off my shoulder.  
There was something in there
about being self obsessed
and I wasn’t sure if it was you or me.
You see, it can’t have been me.

So looking at the atomizing of this
bit of seasoned ash, turning
eponymously into itself
like an overwrought postmodern
text, I think and think again
of your face, lit by smirking lamps
and the rain in pissy rivulets,
and I wonder what is left,
at the end, in the grate of us,
but ashes, turning helplessly
to dust.