Mark Mayes has published stories and poems in magazines and anthologies. In 2017, his novel, The Gift Maker, was published.

Mark also likes to write songs.

 

 

 

The Accident

They stand each side of a wedding cake,
so young and thin and puzzled there.
He holds a knife above the icing.
Her eyes fall inward, her mouth unsure.

The image, badly stuck on card,
dwarfed by a shabby, tarnished frame,
they gaze on to a room now hardly used.

Bruised by life, their older selves
succumbed to television and the news.
The hollow glee of lottery night
held their separate shrinking faces like a vice,
until the final draw,
the torn up ticket in the ashtray.

I loaded the van, slammed the door,
and drove into my orphaned future.
The others didn’t want the picture.
It rattled around in a box of plates.
I heard it all the hundred miles,
cutting through my healing songs.

The other end, I saw the glass had cracked.
The cake pristine, the knife absurd.
A splinter of light lay between
their now lost faces; a final word?

© 2018 Mark Mayes