Today I Want to Miss Only My Favourite Shoes of All Time

More akin to ousted nestlings now
than brogues, the laceless caramel suede
withered scrotal. Once, daylight was kinder,

bouncing back off the polished toecaps. Cloudlike,
cushioning low arches nicely. I felt handsome,
airborne. The sex.

My spirit, iridescent organza.
Should have enshrined them. I stormed them
into French onion soup

weather too often, they went the way of all things
beautiful: wore up one side,
the wet seeped in.

Whatever craft joined the sole steadfast
degraded, came unglued.
You must imagine them reduced

to a flipflop smackety-smack against
the path’s dodgy pop-up flags.
I thought of the deep-fried sleaze of chitterlings

killed on the cusp of fun-loving.
Thought of beachcombers in oilskins
liberating from the sand and wrack

these two buffeted currachs
that returned as skeletal relics west.
My various travels strewn

for dissection on the cobbler’s bench
like stunned bats

any second to flap wild about the room.

–Dean Browne

Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Recent poems have appeared in London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His first collection After Party will be published by Picador this year.