
'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.