Fragments And Reflections

Old Times

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.