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Business Booming For Rent-a-Friend Agencies

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I am a best man, an old friend, even a husband

For those who need that special someone

I never judge their motives nor their reasons

I am happy to put on that predefined face

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For friendship isn’t just a case of reciprocity

Neither is it a process of bartering

It’s a sense of security that you feel when it’s there

A loss all too revealing of oneself when not

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Family then is a different thing altogether

A knowledge of a comfortable home and a formal awkwardness

Where things that need to be said often never are

A festering buildup… Read More

What if it was just that one little thread

Which meant the difference between him going to her instead of me

What if it actually never happened

Existing only as another ‘what might have been’

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What if I were to weave this thread in my tale

Diverting it into a vacant and adjacent stitch of fate

For me that’d be a far more refined resolution

Than the tears that run down when all is too late

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Copyrighted image belongs to Sharon Smith (portfolio)

I am needed somewhere urgently

Shepherded through a massive crowd

Time is short as I weave in and out

I think of nothing but the desperate rush I am in

Until a bewitching face flashes past

Headed in the opposite direction

Her eyes shine out from beneath her veil

Glowing as she pushes something: a pram or a stretcher

She is so familiar to me but I am unrecognised

There is no eye contact

Nor the slightest acknowledgment 

As if we weren’t supposed to meet yet in this alternate life

My aides grow impatient

Many shoulders bump into mine

My wild and hurried steps now tamed

And just like that she is gone

Lost in the flock and hidden from my sight

The job at hand turns insignificant as she, now, is my urgency

 … Read More

What does life mean to you, at this particular moment in time?

For me, life is sitting on my balcony, overstocked with chairs

Savouring the taste of my last cigarette late on a Sunday night

Looking out onto an empty school yard, the whistling wind brushing up against the leaves of a hundred year old tree

Where the cicadas sing under flickering stars suspended in a deep and dark blue sky

I am 26 years old, a brain ticking away within the body of a young man

Thinking of my dear beloved on her long journey home

And there isn’t much more to be told, in all honesty

As the story of my life on this one day at 26 years is rather simple

Yet I hope to remember it, and value this moment of self reflection

For the way… Read More