In many short years
we’ll know we were sweet and naive.
We’ll think about the things we thought,
our understated predictions
our dinner table conversations.
There were floaters
in our oracle’s eyes.
It will not be the now
that we know.

As what happens to us
disappears
like the sound of an engine
in the fog,
moving away.

In many short years
Auschwitz has a café.
After the tour
all the waitresses
come from the kitchen
uniformed
to sing to you
on your birthday.


In many short years
they’ll build on Chernobyl
and Fukushima will be an oasis.
There’ll be fields of bodies
fertilising strawberries
for other countries.

-

We’ve got no memory.
Horrors aren’t like happiness
they lose their impact
with every sharing
and every listen.

Will you be there?
In the next big thing.
Think of that.
How much faster everything’s destroyed
than it’s made.
Think of what work your life took

Wrong gods appear again.
As always a side will be picked for you.
As always the goals are your own.

And the answers are more questions,
homophones,
the same lessons
and still they’ll bomb playgrounds
built on bomb sites.


-

Then the next big thing.
Your entropy,
that starts and ends in fire.
The wolf
from another wood and paper town.
The flames on your monuments
and shopfronts
caught on divine wind
and a scent for sin.

Most now know
they’ve never been scared before.
Things you never thought could alight
prove you wrong.
The air stings and follows
and the clouds finally become too much for the sun.

Your heartbeat’s afterlife
is someone else’s tutting.

Unread letters,
guitars and bars with history,
family traditions
and the weight of her hand,
thumb hooked to the belt loop
of your jeans

are now one weather formation.

And under all
is flat and yellow
like an African morning.

Is it angels or great bats
which have given you
your turn?

SCENE I: A CHIAROSCURO OF IDYLLS AND TAINTED ZONES. Curse the newsagents and bless the chain-store coffee shops; forgo zero-cal drinks for chai lattes. Time might heal the hospital's harm, but the sand in the hourglass promises nothing. Back from Uncanny Valley, she's here for one day only: please welcome...

UNDERSTUDY
[warming up for the performance of her second-rate lifetime; faults and failings all dolled up in costume jewellery, consoled by every artifice except the Self:]
They brought me back button-eyed.
I'm by the bus shelter in last Body's clothes,
recalling our trips here one Body ago:

[an ILOVEYOU loiters on the corner of this street —
it tips its chin and stares a greeting.]

UNDERSTUDY
I lower my gaze
in routine
fashion.

SCENE II: A GUIDED TOUR.
ILOVEYOU stalks a metre behind.

ILOVEYOU
[bellowing intermittently:]
Charity-shop libraries (plural) wherein mundane spectacles
were made of ourselves; hushed confrontations cause
scenes behind stage curtains. Shopfronts that site
your effigy in my mother's eyes. Kisses, tears, the
tying of scarves, Starbucks, ducks, parks, book-cover
inscriptions, living a love story while not lucid
enough to document it—

UNDERSTUDY
[syncopated; mumbled into crescendo:]
—five-lap treks, pyjama-clad, year-round shivers through phantom autumn gales. Empty quests amid off-licence shelves; chip-shop smells, taunting; slo-mo supermarket crawls, clearance sections, the listless skimming of labels; sleepy insomniac; brick walls upon which I sat hunched and feasting like some rabid feral dog, 'consumed' in passive voice and 'wasting away' in active, walk it off WALK IT OFF—

ILOVEYOU/UNDERSTUDY
One meeting without warrant for apology. No words to shepherd back into the ribcage they'd tunnelled out of.

ILOVEYOU
I swore no-one would touch me and then melted in your palms—dread being seen at all, but devour your "you look good". No personal growth, but raised by stilts; no less virulent, but restrained behind masks. The sickness takes a different shape. I fear you'll discern the difference. I also fear that you won't.

UNDERSTUDY
A half-finished narrative or a blackout poem? You've gone from 'knowing too much' to having only the chapters we co-write: "Better this way," I say, and stand by it. I can starve and starve and still never master how not to Want; how to tell my heart these Wants aren't Needs; how to stop them escaping through the craters between bones.

ILOVEYOU
I feel larger than life but I'd cast off my limbs to fit inside your pocket. My friendship must taste like eagerness to please; still, you'll eat from my spoon and I'll open wider than required for yours...

ILOVEYOU/UNDERSTUDY
...yes, we'll name it 'nourishment'.