FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found

After the party

Martin Charlton

Dawn afire!

The rising sun spies through a gap in the curtains. 

Our eyes meet across plump white pillows, 

as night retreats in on itself, 

taking with the man I once was.

With ’80s disco still ringing in my ears, 

you smile and it lifts me higher than the gibbous moon 

we danced badly beneath, in our drunken state, 

as we staggered along Margate seafront.

I smile back at you – my Adonis 

                                   – my Osiris 

                                   – god of rebirth and resurrection, 

whose philosophy is that anything is possible and age is just a number. 

Reluctantly I had attended last night’s party and was in fact just leaving, 

but the universe clearly had other ideas. 

Did I bump into you? Or was it you into me?

Whatever! It resulted in my wearing your drink and the rest, as they say, is history. 

So here we are, 

the morning after the night before and I feel you’ve reinvented me.

You lean across and as we kiss my years 

fall away into an abyss of time.

Composed: Café G, Margate, 21 February 2019

This revised and expanded edition, Turner Contemporary, 29 January 2022

© Martin Charlton, 2019 & 2022.