It’s been said that a line can be straight,
or a street, but the human heart
is curved like a road through mountains.
If that’s the case I hope a row of goats
are walking over me on my way to you,
otherwise wouldn’t that journey be lonely?
And that same person said
when so many are lonely as seem to be lonely,
it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
If it’s also been said that time
is the longest distance between two places,
does that mean our bodies have been three years apart,
which is greater than the thousands of miles of sea between us,
but you’re as real to me as the ground I’m walking on
and the trains I ride to work and back?
And if in memory,
everything happens to music,
what would have been playing as you drank a small beer
with your bare feet on the carpet of a pub floor?
Two new fish in a vast ocean swimming side by side,
sniffing out a new continent. I have no idea.
The violets in the mountains have broken through the rocks.
I don’t know how they did it,
but I’m happy for them,
for gentle things to be victorious
even in the name of destruction.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
Romantic love is beautiful. How easily it is broken.
All cruel people describe themselves
as paragons of frankness. They shout
We don’t love you any more! as the rest of us
run into the sea. What else are you supposed to do
on this earth but catch whatever comes to you,
with all your fingers, until your fingers are broken?
I am looking at you through nondescript music again.
Add to that the distortions of my own ego.
How cloudy the glass has become.
I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth,
to myself as much as to you.
It has been said that there’s a time for departure
even when there’s no certain place to go.
We all live in a house on fire
with no fire brigade to call.
I suppose that just leaves the top floor window
and a queen-sized duvet to break the fall.
The paragons of frankness are shouting again.
This time Life is an unanswered question!
and now we shout back
But let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question!
Failing everything else, there’s always
the eating of an unwashed grape as a romantic means of dying.
And there’s always a handsome man
with a moustache and a large silver watch
if you’re prepared to look hard enough.
And since we’re all sentenced to solitary confinement
inside our own skins,
and since physical beauty is transitory,
we should all learn to live with it.
Then close the door on it
when the time comes that you look in the mirror
and realise that what you see is all that you will ever be.
And then you accept it.
Or you stop looking in mirrors.