Shhh, don’t tell anyone

It’ll be our secret, as I circle your lips,

We can sit and laugh about it, and we’ll be like cardboard cut-outs

To everybody else.

 

Shh don’t tell anyone,

We’ll make a secret pact

And bathe in the splendour of a shared little patch of knowledge,

Our own little ground;

For secrets cannot be delighted in alone.

 

Shh, don’t tell anyone,

It will only stain the bed linen,

Your throat gargling like mine with a gleeful chuckling,

Like two kids holding a sandpit as their rightful fortress.

But shh, don’t speak a word,

Do not even breathe, just hold your breathe,

Do not let the sky, collapse on us,

Due to the weakening support of our pact.

 

The breathe seeps into the air making smoke,

And the leaves are crunching under foot,

They seem to be saying;

‘Ours, this is ours, don’t you tell anyone now!’

And their right, if you did, the sunshine and the laughing,

And holding a mirror to my grotesque reflection, would all be gone,

Obsolete. No more laughing at me looking like a trussed up turkey.

 

Stick your hand up me and through my head, And make me a puppet!

I could do the same to you, we could be puppets controlling puppets

In perfect timing, dependant on one another

Like wheels and spokes,

Man and wife,

Mexicans and Americans,

The ill and the lab-coat.

 

And shhhh, don’t tell anyone,

Because there’ve been others who did,

I trusted them and we did laugh,

But my laughs drowned out theirs,

And I saw them, telling others, sharing our joy

Whoring our promise,

Gathering crowds and making them laugh.

Their laughs were so unclean!

Their eyes darted like schools of fish,

Around the trail of laughter,

That ripped through the crowd

Like the plague.

 

 

And the sky, Crushed down on top of me like I was Samson!

And it turned from virgin white to a purpley-redy muck.

 

So shh don’t tell anyone,

And we can trust and love and feed off only each other,

No man is an island,

No man is a fort.