Prisoners of the Window-Blind
Yes, my first clue, I now know, should have been
your love of beautiful but dead flowers;
the sickening yet sweet smell still lingers
though you have been gone these many hours.
With innocence, to you I gave roses,
a promise of love and life in their bloom;
they symbolized my deep passion for you,
their scent permeated every room.
With guilt, you accepted roses from me
and then, though some life was still evident;
from water, you took these symbols of love,
crucified, downward they now hung, life spent.
Bound by cord, your roses hung upside-down,
inverted, they soon dried and mummified;
they were the prisoners of the window-blind:
against this backdrop, you schemed and lied.
Live roses lie on the altar of love,
dead roses should lie where others decay;
you would lie where and when you could;
the past tense of lie is not always lay.
You did not seem to fully comprehend
that your dead, dry roses were really you:
dried, tied, and mummified, yet you still lied;
what was that person I loved, and who?
John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada, living in Istanbul. He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, “Snowbound in the House of God” (Memoirist, May 2023). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (“In Search of Alice Munro”, June 2023), Literary Yard (“She Got What She Deserved”, June 2023), Freedom Fiction (“The Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author”, July 2023), The Serulian (“The Memory Box”, September 2023), The Montreal Review (“Letter from Istanbul”, November 2023) & Erato Magazine (“A Day in May, 1965”). The author’s story, “Ruth’s World” (Fiction on the Web, March 2023) was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. His first full-length publication will be the gay-themed children’s picture book, The First Adventures of Walli and Magoo, to be published in 2024.
