Weekly Poem: ‘Doctor Frankenstein on Love’

I gave him everything I love,
The high forehead,
which looks so endearing on babies,
on his face
became a frightening cliff-drop
of skull,
and the vacant eyes,
with their hint of lethal hurt,
were the same cornflower-blue irises
I plucked
from the beggared sockets
of the dead.

I thought we could live again,
like memory,
that we would rise from unrequited
flesh
as only bodies carefully
stitched
from remnants can.

But he lurches like an old film
unspooling
and dreams in a language
not his own;
sometimes just the white amnesia
of a flower
makes him weep.