A WONDERFUL LIFE
Kathy, lovely Kathy,
you’re just seventeen,
a sixth former with slip-on self-assurance,
doing an additional A-level
(in Sophistication),
talking Blake and Camus over coffee,
inhaling Coltrane and Beethoven’s late quartets,
Kathy with the liquefying lips and willing breasts
and spring in your smile.
You’re free from
the quagmire of kids
(nappies, potties, snot, spots);
games of happy families with cardsharper in-laws
and the Oedipean, Oresteian tragedy
of turning thirty;
after that the long death-march across mindless plains,
mediocre amid mediocrities,
just another Cycladic head;
days, weeks, months, years, decades of sameness –
dull, dull, dull, dull, dull,
only enlivened by prostate trouble and piles;
finally a joyless retirement from a meaningless job;
then afternoons of staring at dust-motes in wintry sunbeams;
unliving your life by forgetting bits of it;
waiterly disdain and the furious indifference of shop assistants;
insidious dilapidation – wonky eyes and ears, squiggly fingers,
insubordinate bowels
and the ultimate betrayal, by the bastard liver –
falling asleep after four drinks.
Kathy, lovely Kathy,
you’re free from all that
and still seventeen
over sixty years later.
You’ll always be seventeen
until I die
and with me my memories
of my first girlfriend
before the move for dad’s new job
made me lose touch with you.
Actually
she’s almost certainly snuffed it by now,
or is slowly zimmering off into the sunset,
like me,
fallen among husks
that are drooling in the death row of armchairs
in front of the shouty TV,
confounded by Coronation Street,
here in our frigging home from home –
the Enchanted Elders Serenity Centre.
SYNECDOCHE
Two trees
grey gaunt
no leaves no buds no nests
branches and twigs clenched in agony,
a madman’s scribble on the sky
motionless writhing
speechless screaming
two contorted torture victims;
refugees from lands of famine and flood
reaching out Belsen-thin fingers and arms;
when the wind blows,
skeletons jerking in a dance of death
a prodigy beside a portent.
The man had been pissed off because these two trees at the bottom of his
neighbour’s garden blocked the sunlight for his boozy barbecues, so one
night he leaned over the fence and poured diesel oil on their roots,
murdering nature.