Feeling Blue

Blue Nude, c.1902 - Pablo Picasso

You

The harsh halo of

Fluorescent lights

Envelop you

As if in my embrace

A thousand

Camera flashes

Preserved and extended

You

In that one moment

Paper and Ink

The reluctant humdrum, drone, whine

Of tired cogs and wheels

Creaky joints protest, pout, pine

Screaming for better deals

(Is that not an omen, a sign

Of death’s maw at its heels?)

Churned out ply by ply, sheath by sheath

Reams of trees beaten down

Cardboard castles, an ode, a wreath

‘Mere skeletons’, they frown

Rusty blood and metallic ink

Seep into dry papers

Endless veins that ceaselessly drink

Thirst that never tapers

Painfully dripped from hearth-side urns

Stoking failing fires

Panacea for cuts and burns?

Yet she never tires

(Machine and body, it still turns

Held by hope and wires)