Richard Pierce

Richard Pierce – author, poet, painter

Poetry

Still Life – Travel

I unpick my layers of skin,
An old wound healing,
Softened rawness,
The scab gone, some more
Of my DNA scattered
Over the cutting room floors
Of my travelling.

It doesn’t hurt,
This unravelling of what I am
Made of, the picking at the physical
Part of my soul. My fingers
Do it automatically, and
I watch their work
Without thinking.

There is a welt on my knuckle now,
Where a hole was, and rushing blood
One morning some weeks ago,
Dresssing next to a nameless bed,
The sun and rain outside the
Strange window, and
A longing for home under the pain.

I peel it all back,
Time, fear, money
And responsibility,
Until all is gone, and
I stand there naked.
The blood drips onto the floor –
Audibly.

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