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.