Carol Ann Duffy - Disgrace lyrics

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Carol Ann Duffy - Disgrace lyrics

But one day we woke to our disgrace; our house a coldness of rooms, each nursing a thickening cyst of dust and gloom. We had not been home in our hearts for months. And how our words changed. Dead flies in a web. How they stiffened and blackened. Cherished italics suddenly sour on our tongues, obscenities spraying themselves on the wall in my head. Woke to your clothes like a corpse on the floor, the small d**hs of lightbulbs pining all day in my ears, their echoes audible tears; nothing we would not do to make it worse and worse. Into the night with the wrong language, waving and pointing, the shadows of hands huge in the bedroom. Dreamed of a naked crawl from a dead place over the other; both of us. Woke. Woke to an absence of grace; the still-life of a meal, untouched, wine-bottle, empty, ashtray, full. In our sullen kitchen, the fridge hardened its cool heart, selfish as art, hummed. To a bowl of apples rotten to the core. Lame shoes empty in the hall where our voices asked for a message after the tone, the telephone pressing its ear to distant, invisible lips. And our garden bowing its head, vulnerable flowers unseen in the dusk as we shouted in silhouette. Woke to the screaming alarm, the banging door, the house-plants trembling in their brittle soil. Total Disgrace. Up in the dark to stand at the window, counting the years to arrive there, faithless, unpenitent. Woke to the meaningless stars, you and me both, lost. Inconsolable vowels from the next room.