Ink crawls out of its afternoon puddle and onto her to do list

The street spits its phlegm at the glass facade

Of the little gallery at 83

A special delivery scheduled for lunchtime

Well, “between 12 and 4”

It’s the fragile portrait

A framed opinion on reflection

It’s what she’s been waiting for.

Jet black hair now streaked into grey and white

Her fire dwindling

With the embers of her remembers

Ashes raked behind her ears

Her memory throws a thought from her past

She catches it, if only to fumble

It breaks into a painful puzzle

Surrounding her stilettos

His hoover would dive at the parquet floor.

Spreading its arms

Snatching

Sucking

He took a piece of her each time

But never wondered why there was less upon his return

He always turned up

Although was rarely ever there.

A dissonant

Clawing at her openings

Views made so public at her private views

His canapé concepts were difficult to swallow

It never dawned on him that his tongue was hollow

So amid the myopic hello’s of the latest shows

Where whiskers were stroked toward answers

To questions that weren’t always posed

Haircut chauffeurs would ponder how they ponder

Names from the top of the tree broke

As they were spilt from frail lips

Of those trying to branch out

Liquorice tourniquets dipped in shimmering sherbet

Take refuge in top pockets

Listening to aching hearts

She wore shoulder pads

Just so he didn’t glance over her shoulders

He really new nothing of the fragile portrait

Not even caring whether it was hanging straight

In the yesterdays she knew

She had laminated her dreams

Because she was not dying to live forever

Nor worrying about tomorrow’s weather

But bubble wrap rain was still rain

However she packaged it

Valium’s slow wave would break across her cappuccino

Pearl binoculars used only to see the backs of her hands

She saw her past as a constellation in the night

There was much more darkness

But her soul gazed toward the light

This unintended gift

She has only recently started to understand

“Has it come yet Jasmine?” She asks

“No, what is it anyway? Do we have room for another picture?”

The buzzer suddenly looses its shit

And the fed ex man

Comes and goes

An apparition

Young love

Where is it now?

She takes her prized delivery to the bathroom

The whitest place she knows

She rips of its protection

Even that says fragile

Placing it on the only spare hook in the building

She hangs the animated portrait

That we all look at

Yet none of us see the same

“Up a bit, a bit to the left, up a bit further, that’s it”

She thinks to herself

She once again can hold the gaze of her reflection

Since the days before he walked into number 83.

Because he knew her gallery’s worth

But little of her value

Looking at her new mirror

And her old self

She steps forward

To the basin beneath

And washes her hands