feral senses

Lonely child run.

Run back to your bolthole, each ground covering
gallop increases your safety zone, you slow to wade through thick
green whipping grass. Throughout this escape your pale
milk-coloured limbs slowly tan through souring yellow rage.

He crouches twitching on sparrow legs,
Fearful to sit down and rest fearing sleep again,
Dreading to wake to seek revenge against those who beat you,
your victorious captors. Through silent hollow breaths you creep
forward around landmine snapping branches to take point,
scouting ahead ready to run on, to flee.
Further into this green gloved world. As last year’s dried dead
leaves hustle on along by a shivering breeze.
The forest floor echoes fleeting sounds of the ocean waves on the
rocks, the sounds you remember? A memory? Or more perhaps a
hope for the less lonely future.

Crows bark above with angry threats similar in tone to what is known
back home. Smudged faded t-shirts, lazily over washed in
attempts to purge them cling to a soft peach bruised body with a
bitter hard stone inside through braced tensing from beatings.
These poorly fitting hand me down clothes leave you always shivering
for warmth that you so desperately seek. Numb from hours outside
unable to distinguish time due to wandering alone, words forgotten
mouth opens with no sounds to escape as feral senses set in.

Run on and dive into your castle hidden deep its walls made from the
brambles and overgrowth. With your soot grey smudged eyes
peeking out from this bastions turret looking for all enemies.

The curtain draws and darkens late as these summer days are
stretched over times bent knee. waiting with deep calm breaths
silent to the world, safe as though you cannot see them and they
cannot see you.

Moving with agile and stealth

Into the darkening hours to return home, silently slipping in
through a peeling white washed back door turning the cold
handle and upstairs to bed to curl up in your duvet nest.

Muddy and safe only to wake early and escape again.

So rolls on summer until the school term begins
that quiet awkward boy takes awhile to adjust back to friends and
sounds after a summer of human silence and isolation.