hi, how you doing? just checking in to say
we all agreed that your jokes weren’t funny
and we found the sporadic,
confessional insights quite intense—
self-flagellatory, even. also, you know
that sincerely-held opinion you expressed
really earnestly? yeah we all think that was
trite. horrifically unoriginal.
that takeaway won’t make you feel better,
by the way— and, not to worry you, but
I think you’re due a really bad day at work
tomorrow.
i’m trying to be more environmentally conscious
but it’s hard when i just want to leave the car
running in the driveway, filling the street with
the sound of someone coming home again.
and I’ve been cranking the temp each night,
to make up for a recent halving of body heat.
the truth is i’m wistful for the days of holes
in the ozone layer and i miss the foreboding
bbc segments that filled the blissful silences
on our aimless sunday drives.
and even though i’m not in the business
of making heroes of mere mortals,
it seems to me that playing the way
that we’d want play— our David, with
slingshotted humanity, in the arena of
gods— is the stuff statues are built on.
but bodies break for the sake of
legend.
and when we cried, in that first true
afternoon of summer, it was not
because things didn’t have to change,
but, rather, because sometimes they do.
two kids were sat on jackets in the front garden as the afternoon rolled into a cool spring evening. but they did not have time to notice any of that because they had never been as old as they were then and despite the soft cotton underneath them, everything below seemed only to exist to hold them up beside each other and they refused the inevitability of changing seasons, deciding instead to live in that moment forever.
the pub condom machine man
walked his final round
with a distinct melancholy—
tapping firmly, one last time,
on the sides to see if the change box jingled
and lamenting the dwindling
prevalence of an odd loose pound
in the pockets of the hopeful
among the weekend crowd.
he finished up in the sterile light
of the tesco toiletry isle—
scoffing at the low multipack prices
and the lack of spring-loaded
levers in the whole affair.
he decided, finally,
that he much preferred
the colours on his machines:
the defiance in the muted tones
of the faded durex labels
and the twinkle of LEDs.
After I’d put them all together—
Assembled all the songs that I could ever need,
The kind that hoist your heart up into your throat
to fill your head with it’s improbable notions.
And the ones that drown you in the thick euphoria
of some European club, as a heaving humanity flashes
between the pulsing strobe lights and LEDs.
Those songs that gnaw at the facade, built
over time to resist any vulnerability, until it reveals
the most exposed skin from youthful innocence.
The ones that suspend you in the soft light
of a small forever, between the balmy afternoon
and the night that will recede all too quickly.
And the songs that I would blast through my
foraged walkman, four years into the apocalypse—
the acidic air spreading the waves over the shore
where I sit amongst the memories of those lost—
and still feel grateful to have existed at all.
After I’d put it all together— I named the playlist
‘tunes’.
pub, on a monday afternoon.
I find myself a quiet corner,
lower my drink onto one of those shelves
that jut out of dividing walls,
and perch on a stool.
I pick the one whose structural
uncertainty complains the loudest—
figuring that discomfort runs
parallel to authenticity.
another man nods towards me.
I’d tell him I’m a poet, I think,
drunk on the knowledge
that we will never speak.
the younger man behind him
slinks around the dark-wood bar
that is ignorantly blissful to its outdatedness.
he wears a waistcoat, smartly,
and his hair looks like it doesn’t
require the use of electric clippers.
I could kiss him— above the canopy of chatter
that dampens the fizzing playback
of radio 1 and the flat, synthetic
ring of a busy landline phone.
the table of americans beside me
nearly demystify the moment.
but I incorporate them in as
brash nouveaux-riches tourists
who i’ll charm with knowledge
of their precious hemingway.
i was quite content, really,
breezing through the corridors—
happily dismissing anything that
didn’t rise above the gentle blur.
because a current of sadness
runs below each entanglement,
knowing you are bound to follow
each elusive thread to the same
conclusion:
that nothing in that assembly
of incidents and circumstance
can fulfil the illimitable promise
made by every first encounter.
and still, we cannot help but look.
he’d led them into the bustling foyer—
both just inaudible to each other
beneath the sound of every conversation
unfolding all at once, endings unheard.
and as they settled into their seats,
drinking in the dimmed house lights,
they enjoyed the gentle intoxication
of the nighttime’s boundlessness
and his misted eyes dodged the curtain
that was lifting on sober reality.
i had to give the taxi driver 2 stars.
he was pleasant enough when I got in
and the tired backseat upholstery rang out
the same smell of my parents’ old zafira.
but the rating was dropping the moment
he switched on radio 4’s science hour
as we crept past your mum’s house.
then he didn’t take that left-hand turn
near the church where you lost your faith
and towards the alleyway, stretching on into
the estate’s heart, where you found it again.
instead we moved through the pools of gold
that used to splash up onto our soft faces—
diffused, now, by his subtle window tints.
he couldn’t even set his heaters to breathe
out the same cool air that would roll over
our warm, aching skin as we held back the
summer evenings. and when i lent in and said
“here is fine”, the half-lit shapes in the mirror
kept sinking further into the misty night .
Uncultured Review 