12th May, 2010
Labour’s Love Lost
I would not trivialise your demise dear bro
with half-baked bons mots about that day or this
but I will say
What stunned me
– in the back of the car
crossing town for that brutal farewell –
what slapped me in the face
(and does today)
was the way
the world despite calamity carries on
oblivious.
There was your name
in bold blunt prison
behind Ham & High wire mesh
searing
and yet
the impudent business of living
– bastards standing at bus-stops –
went ridiculously on
as if any meaningful bus could ever –
a girl on her mobile
laughing
laughing?
another, taking leave, hand on hip, of a guy,
skirt stretched, one heel braking her wheeled suitcase
going somewhere
as if going somewhere
still meant anything
when we now know it’s just
going ridiculously on.
And later, when Downing Street called
it’s not that I wasn’t grateful
it’s that it was too late for prime ministerial tea
and sympathy to sugar the shock of earth’s outrageous turning
(he’s gone, by the way, I meant to say, your decent friend,
just yesterday, with two bonny lads and some dignity).
Of the numbing fractured kaleidoscope of that day’s images
one alone spoke sense:
Closing Down Sale
acknowledging as it did
resignation
acknowledging as we must
passing
heydays’ ebb and heydays’ flow
and look, here’s one again, on Oxford Street,
Everything Must Go.
