The world is fast and reckless
like a stampede of beasts and
teenage ***.
It constantly reminds me
of my once mobile life,
before atrophy set like plaster
in my bones.
Everyone used to walk
to where they needed to be,
not because the roads were congested,
but because it was so.
It seems that excuse is just not good enough
anymore.
At times I think:
neither am I.
I still walk the streets
and browse the shop-fronts.
It takes me a little longer these days
to read the signs and labels,
the easy mating calls of the merchants
standing under bigger names
and brighter lights.
Nobody courts anymore.
Hands are held far too easily
and intimacy seems to have become
yet another commodity.
I remember my sweetheart
and the years we lived in absences,
sleeping with a lie
in a life of compromise.
Our eyes stared past the darkness of the room,
beyond to something, somewhere,
far from where we found our lives to be.
I remember her well
amongst the ruins of my years.
How desperate were the days
before we met,
exchanging platitudes for company
in our first loveless marriages.
How bitter I was,
bound within ever decreasing circles
of routine and passionless chains.
I exquisitely recall the day
I finally broke from them.
You and I
met over letters,
our eyes scanning and reciting
each other's loneliness
and fear of never finding a place.
The saliva of the stamp
brought us to a closeness
unbounded by geography.
These days,
nobody understands the thrill of a postbox
and the welcome mat
has become nothing more
than a place to wipe the **** from your shoes,
as the day nurse comes to visit,
kicking pizza leaflets
to the edges of the hallway.
There was excitement in the morning,
sleep thinned to prepare
for that slap of paper
and rattle of metal.
Presently my life feels little more
than an emptied school
in the endless weeks of summer;
a sugar paper lantern
left to bleach in the sun.
I lie in wait,
for the times you appear - a phantasm
in my day. A moment reserved
with the assumption you will be sitting there,
ageing with irrefutable brilliance,
in the chair you stubbornly frequented
ever since our retirement.
I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
I’ll accept the come-down
when I enter the room
and you are not there,
if it permits me a moment of belonging.
The air is cancerous
with the noises of the streets.
We used to stop and listen
to the busker by the bridge,
always pleading upon bended knee
for someone to validate his melody
and make his callouses worthwhile.
Now, I live on in near-silence.
It has been weeks since I spoke to someone
who did not rush me through my sentences.
I am trying to learn the patterns of today,
a way to bow my sad head
and pay up for my goods
in the blink of an eye,
in a way to defy that I am old and slow.
I avoid home mostly
and instead, I walk through
the same route each day,
hoping for a friend
or else never to be noticed.
Hunger will eventually deliver me,
confused at our door.
I turn the television on quickly
to **** the silence that forms
in the spaces you would have spoken in.
On the rare occasions
that I talk to someone,
my eyes blur with inexplicable tears,
a kind of tension grips me,
as if I have missed the last step on the stairs.
I swallow panic
like all of those pills that never work,
instead fogging my mind,
distorting all anchors
to a meaningful life.
The television shouts at me
across the room, patronising like
the cold-callers and politicians.
Everything seems to be an advert
and the news is getting uglier.
Sometimes I turn on the radio,
to give my eyes a rest,
but music isn’t music anymore.
We never wasted our moments on kids,
but I have grown soft in old age,
and perhaps I would like
to have the comfort of your features
blurred with mine, bestowed upon
our trial-and-error attempt at a legacy.
The money will dry up.
I have started smoking again.
Though I still smoke on the doorstep,
because I know you never liked the smell.
These are just the thoughts of an old man,
some doctored flicker show
Where I can cut out all of the ugliness,
and leave just us.