That We Are In Fact It

As If Sixteen Years Ago

I'm trying to say this as softly as I can

So that it disappears when you're not looking

Like light on a soap bubble soon to pop

Popping as you turn around

If that makes any sense

An almost ode

To the concerto you heard

Where the maestro struck a bum note

Or two

And what you heard at the last apologists for the half arsed effort meeting

That Hey, I kinda liked Rocky Five

.. Just sayin‘
And the carnival girls taking a five minute fag break 

Global tragedies eventually form a backdrop to our mundanities

Adding shade to our little potterings about

For instance

I was washing the dishes when the first tower was hit

Just think about the myriad unsexy little tasks

Such as a shopper allowing the person behind them with lesser items in front of them in the queue

Or

A boy walking out of his way to retrieve a friend’s lost property

Being performed in Hiroshima just before they dropped the bomb

And now consider how passing a child on a swing

Calling higher, higher

Can bring back all that tender trauma of childhood

Realising that we don't leave the past behind

But that it leaves us

One cannot look at smouldering ruins without thinking of one's history

Those things you did

Those things you didn't

Things you said you didn't mean

Things you didn't say that you did

And how looking at a shipwreck

The shipwrecks in old paintings

Bring a word to mind

  The word family

Often with the prefix my

We're all so Goddamn fucking flawed

That should make us love one another

But .. shit .. the ego ain’t cool with that

Memories play in the mind's eye

Old movies make for Monday Matinees

In black and white

Men and women preserved in Kodak

Captured in sepia

As old and gold as nicotine stains

Like bugs in amber

Maybe life is just a series of mistakes one was willing at one point to make

Anything beyond death being gravy

   Or lemonade

From all those lemons God handed to us

I'm thinking about those Rothkoesque patterns

That form on the back of your eyelids

-Though front to yourself-

When morning sun falls upon them

That momentarily displaces the gloom and guilt your mind pinned there the night before

And a time  in the park

When approaching the dramatic conclusion of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

A bluebottle fly landed upon the page

Midsentence

And those days when we'd watch one another

And then we'd watch the water

As if it crept out of the river

The sink filling up

Brimming with fairy liquid

Warm

Wombish

Catching the day shining through the window

As I start to wash the dishes

Before I get distracted

By the announcement of breaking news on the television
   And wonder what comes first
                                        Is it the hurt
                                               Or knowing that it hurts?