Black marble boy sleeps in a crate,
up there, dank beyond the pink
blue rooms infertile.
Up there, below the ridge beam,
pillowed as cake on paper plates,
Black marble boy wets the morning.
Cracked in the web and cardboard,
the sooner suns, hard-tongued like cats
to a grooming, divest a storming kestrel,
Before which he rolls a die, unpalmed,
rounded unsettled, on the wide pine floor
above those pining pink blue rooms below,
infertile as another stripped autumn blooms.
Image: Adrien Converse on Unsplash
Sweet and Bitter Greens 
I am led by curiosity to ask who is black marble boy, Devon. I always find your work intriguing and may contain unsuspected subtexts that are not immediately apparent. I know you have a unique style, and some of the ideas here are so compulsively interesting. Each country has its own store of myth and legend of more recent times to draw on, and it great to share that!
Hi Ray. Thanks for reading and commenting. “Black marble boy” is a “ghost” (of my own imagining) that lives in my attic. When we moved here, we learned that no child had ever lived in the house, though it was built in 1913. Strangely enough, all the rooms were painted pink and baby blue. One day, while rummaging around in the attic, I found a black marble and invented a tale about how the marble came to be there – hence “Black Marble Boy”. But this morning, there came to me a sound, barely perceptible, of a marble or some other object rolling across the floor up there – in the dark, in the dust.
D