INDEFINITE HIATUS
No-one had the faintest notion
what to do next,
there were as many alternatives
as there were knockdown
bargains in the sale;
not that it mattered much,
after all, in days
this vaguely taped-together:
the clouds
over the building-site
were not quite there,
dusted fingerprints on a windowpane;
a pigeon’s footsteps
through solidifying cement
have left scripts that will no doubt
outlast us,
mistaken by future historians
as our holy writ…
It all goes back
to that endless afternoon
in Nolan’s, staving off the crash
with another last round
on your card, the epiphanies of youth
transpiring to sweet FA, the jukebox
crooning
that golden oldie:
Halfway through life’s fiasco,
having strayed
from company policy,
I found myself
in a dingy bar…The piecing together
of a new enigma,
but with Yesterday’s Answers
Printed Below, never today’s
eg. I can’t get across to my five-year-old
what cassette-tape is, unspooled,
festooned from a maple
in glittering lianas,
imagined pop-songs
broadcast
to the breeze:
there they are now,
just within earshot,
like summer’s hushed surrender
across town,
the city muttering
in its threadbare sleep:
or is that the drunken snoring
of a homeless teenager
passed out in the empty library?
(First published on Intercapillary Space, 2013)
