We ordered pizzas and tons of crap on the side,
Garlic bread and wedges and skins stuffed with
Cream and jalapeños, eating like we were about
To get the needle, swigging beer and coke and
Watching the kind of movie she'd call 'Man-shit',
Where Keanu's dog gets shot and then he shoots
The dog killers and a bunch of bad-ass Russians,
Filmed with colour filters and a load of slowmo,
A pounding soundtrack on drugs; and we laughed
And talked earnestly about how we need these
Revenge flicks or else we'd be shooting up
The neighbourhood; and I nodded and thought
How fucked up I got when his sister did her
Weird shit on me, and how I had been glad I
Didn't have a Glock, even though I wanted one,
And though she had hurt like a red hot poker
Stuck in my eye, and I could imagine the hiss of
Vitreous humour steaming and my cornea
Bursting and frying on glowing iron, and my
Retina exploding like a fucking supernova,
Somehow I had forgiven her, bitch, with her
Soft smile and milk-white breasts, and
All because of Kill Bill: Volume 1 and
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and even
Leon: The Professional, but not Machete,
Which was fun but gratuitous, and anyway
Was after she had done her weird shit on me.
It was a wrong turn, baby, a wrong turn, and
I wrote it up, all of it, all the words I crafted for
You, that were just for you, for your eyes only,
I put them in one place for the whole fucking
World to see, like I never thought I would, and,
Even when you went, I still wrote, more and more,
Like a lunatic Mark Anthony, listening to the echoes
Of the lies that dripped from your passion fruit lips
– 'Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows bent' – but what the fuck was
That all about? Why did I waste my words?
It was a lifetime ago, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
But sitting there, eating out of boxes, necking
A beer that didn't exist ten years ago, or even one,
It felt like my time-lines got all fucked up, and then
I laughed as I said how Papa Wemba had
Died at sixty-six, and I'd not heard his stuff, I
Just saw the news reports and wondered who he was,
That he was only twenty-three years older than me;
That's just another twenty-three Christmas dinners,
With bad cracker jokes, and turkey that always
Sounds like it will be nicer than it turns out to be;
And suddenly it felt like I'd wasted so much time,
Pissed it into the clockwork gutter as I chased
Blindly after the shadows of lovers burned into
My unconscious like hydrogen bomb silhouettes:
Indelible marks on the mind that haunt me quietly.
YOU ARE READING
Fragments And Reflections
PoetryPoems looking at everything and anything not in my other collections. Here you'll find life and time, wild oceans and lonely coast paths, busy streets and empty hotel rooms, wild concerts and late night writing. All just fragments and reflections, l...