I’ve heard that lovers are like buses—you have to wait for a little while,
and another one comes along; though I can’t help but add: unless the line
is closed for good, while you, unaware of it, are stuck at the bus stop,
tapping your feet and nervously checking a watch, afraid that your ride
will pass you by the moment you’ve given up and started walking.
A random phrase from a poet, like an earworm—and not because I’ve read the poem,
but because I’ve seen the despair—makes me realise that ‘nice’ wasn’t all that good;
in fact, it wasn’t good at all, and yet I still remember you asking if it was enough for me
to read one book, listen to one song, fall for one person, or at least pretend to, and so on,
in order to satisfy what for you hardly constituted seeking to live one’s life. Perhaps
that’s why you took the bus one morning to wherever the driver promised to take you.
What if the fate of humanity depended on a single, random act of a man,
no matter how insignificant—sort of like a Sunday parish raffle,
but with our very existence at stake?
Fairness aside, what are the chances we would survive such a trial?
Being a poet, not a statistician, I can’t really calculate the odds,
though since even on the battlefield there are occasional acts of kindness,
we might be just fine.
But if something like glueing a nail upright to a pavement slab
that I stumbled upon on my evening stroll is not an isolated incident,
then we are eternally screwed.
hidden pilcrow 