Statue

There was a game

we used to play.

We called it ‘statue’,

but we may as well

have called it Love.

It was the one where

someone surprised you

and time stopped;

the one where you

could make someone yours

with a gesture or a glance

and they had to stay that way

forever

or till your heart released them.

Twenty years later

we are still stuck in those attitudes,

still frozen in that moment

that we never got past:

our memories like sculptures

in some museum of the imagination,

keepsakes of vanished days,

the shapes of a longing

that we are allowed to point to,

but not permitted to touch.

Extra

If it every really happens

you won’t be the one

who gets the girl

or saves the world

or dies trying.

Not even the geek in glasses

whom everyone laughs at

until he cracks the code.

You won’t be the villain either:

won’t get to wear fancy outfits

and talk in a fake European accent,

won’t get to laugh

all the way to the bank

or a gruesome death.

You will not know kung-fu.

Instead, you’ll be the one who runs too slowly,

turns around too late;

the driver of the car that gets sideswiped,

the camera toting tourist

whom the aliens zap

or the monster snacks on.

The body in the morgue

or in the bag,

a label attached to your toe.

So the next time you’re watching a movie

and there’s that shot

when someone stares up at certain death,

fascinated,

knowing there’s no escape,

I suggest you pause and take a good look:

because it could be you.

Genie

His father drank too much.

Every time he finished a bottle

his mother would drop a match in –

for revenge, she said.

And the boy would watch in wonder

as the flame licked its way up the sides,

its blue edged screams

silenced behind glass walls.

He used to think it beautiful,

this idea of something trapped and invisible

burning up with itself.

Now he knows the fire does not come

from outside,

it is in the bottle already,

it is trying to escape.

Lear Revisited

“Once upon a time

there was a rich old wolf

who lived in a beautiful palace.

He was a proud wolf, but kind.

One day three little pigs came to him

asking for shelter.

He said he would let them stay

if they promised to

love, honour and obey him.

One of the pigs said

she’d rather die,

so the wolf ate her;

but the other two said

they’d do as he asked

and were allowed to move in.

Then, one day,

when the wolf was out hunting,

the sly little pigs locked him out of the palace.

When the wolf came back

he huffed and he puffed

but he couldn’t blow his own house down.

And so the wolf ran off

and lives in the cold now

with only the eyeless moon

to guide him,

and all the cruel night

to howl away.”

“No, no, grandpa!

You’ve got it all wrong!

The wolf was evil.

He would have devoured the pigs.

But the pigs found out in time

and refused to love him,

and when he tried to slip

back into their affections

by climbing through fire,

they trapped him in his own pot,

screwed the lid on,

and burnt him alive.”

In the simmering light

of the afternoon,

the voices of his grandchildren,

eager as flames.

Getaway

Time is the speed

at which life leaves us behind.

The days like clues

leading us to our own death.

We handcuff indifference to the bed,

are dismayed to find it

following us in the street.

Beauty clings to us in traces,

like lipstick on a glass.

We exist

between the interrogation of memory

and the violence of arrival;

and all it takes is a train

or grief

or some other machine

that howls in the night

to show us how vulnerable we are.

Time is the speed

at which life catches up with us.

There are no alibis for being lonely.

Our only hope

is to get clean away.

Miles on the stereo

A darkness haunted by shadows.

The smoke’s translations

of the night.

The music is a man

opening windows

in his grief;

is the air

trying to find its own scent;

is notes

vanishing into the distance

like streetlights

or the footsteps of a lover

who is walking away.

And the song rains down

like ash

behind a blue window,

like snow

in a blind man’s heart.

Daylight Saving

You died exactly

two minutes after

they set the clocks forward.

It was 1.43 when the hospital called me

but 3.08 by the time I got there,

six minutes too late.

Afterwards,

in the cab back home,

having completed all the formalities

I watched the street vendor laying out

his newspapers

(as though the news still mattered)

and couldn’t shake the feeling

that I had lost something,

been cheated of something:

an hour of your life perhaps,

those imaginary sixty minutes

that I could have spent with you.