'One Night In Phuket' & 'Isn't It Time?': Two Poems by Paul Robert Mullen

one night in Phuket

your eyes the colour of sand and sea

i looked into your world

for lifetimes within hours

i sacrificed my walls

to complete you

opened you up like doors

to another world

held myself breathless

deep inside your skin

as the bass shook layers beneath us

we walked the sands after midnight

hands entwined

our way of letting go

lights on the harbor ringing in my brain

i slept through the alarm

and you were gone

another crowded minivan

cramped with dirty souls and wandering laundry

heading for something more

or less

---

isn't it time?

the first to rise on a sunday morning

i gather my thoughts

in no particular order

stroll ankle deep down beaches

watching soft swells chase the shoreline

then retreat with something

like regret

your email won’t leave me be

isn’t it time you came back home?

i walk past bars i have little recollection of

the swollen lips i’ve kissed

eyes belonging to those worth more

than sex

it’s all trickling back through those cracks

between escape and truth

i return to the hostel

partiers beginning to rise all tatty-headed

swollen eyed

things on their mind

that can wait until tomorrow

---

Paul Robert Mullen is a poet, musician and sociable loner from Liverpool, U.K. He has three published poetry collections: curse this blue raincoat (2017), testimony (2018), and 35 (2018). He has been widely published in magazine, journals and anthologies worldwide. Paul also enjoys paperbacks with broken spines, and all things minimalist. Find him on Twitter: @mushyprm35.

Magazines/E-zines/Journals/Anthologies published in:

Allegro, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Bees Are Dead, Bending Genres, Black Bough Poetry, Blossom In Winter, Bonnie's Crew, Borderlines, Cephalo Press, Cleaning Up Glitter, Constellate, Crossways, Decanto, Dodging The Rain, Dreamcatcher, Eunoia Review, Fire, Four X Four, Ghost City Press, Heron Clan, Last Exit, Light Through The Mist, Mojave Heart, Poetry Pacific, Panning For Poems, Pendora, Selcouth Station, Silk & Smoke, Sub-Rosa, The Canon's Mouth, The Fictional Café, The Fiction Pool, The Foxglove Journal, The Interpreter's House, The Journal, The Mark Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Three Drops From A Cauldron, Turnpike Magazine, Words For The Wild, Wellington Street Review.