Ditty

How can anybody really live here with it’s lights and affairs and it’s all very garish. An opera woman is stuck beneath a bridge and her voice echoes as a 18:46 train rumbles overhead and the old R. Thames splish sploshes aside another thing that happened today. 

Seagulls lark about. Crows look on dismissive. 

Children are just about everywhere from the thicket to the spinney to the scrubland, and parents linger on holding out a phone directly in front engaging with their infant via telecommunicational screen, and what are they capturing without a flash in the dark? Some tiny silhouette doing a pirouette on a concrete slab in London. Fond memories.

I don’t want to be alone when I’m older. You don’t want to feel embarrassed. You don’t want to seem quiet. But she is not quiet. She is resilient. That’s why she is silent.

How can anybody really live here where life is too good to waste. A land of plenty but one ends up wanting more. Pork scratchings the film Closer John they keep dropping off like flies they keep getting divorced and John they’ll send John Lewis gift-wish-gift-lists soon John.

In out, one dies one born, so lonely so happy, one marries one separates.

What’s with all these lit baubles on trees, short trees, more like hedgerows. Waste of light makes your head dizzy. She was really pretty with long legs and auburn hair. She reflected in the dark tinted windows. A man in a suit with rugged meant-to-be-there facial hair studies her right there and then and when home she studies herself in the mirror. Looking good, they both think. The baubles make you blink and squint and maybe they distract you from what you’re really thinking which is, ‘it’s cold out’ but you’re dazzled and so you think, ‘this is bloody marvellous and romantic’. I mean no wonder we’re confused. Most of the time a soundtrack is playing or a coloured tint is being put across a familiar face to hide blemishes and I can always plug in if it’s getting too much and you could be right there facing and talking to me. Oblivious. Me? In your dreams. But remember the clean edits and the montage scenes in rom coms giving the impression of a passage of time filled with happy holding-hand long-shots with sunlight dappling through autumn leaves and ducks being fed and what not. The stakes are very high. Instagram is a lie and I cry.