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A Smaller Step, a Longer Leap
Sitting patiently in the barber’s chair,
flipping through sports mags
as he whistled the repertoire of Martian folk tunes
he’d picked up on a coat hanger antenna
mounted on a blackened wreck of space junk,
the real man in the moon waited
while his hair grew in long, greasy drapes
that twisted like vines through the chair’s fat arms
and tangled around his ankles
and the elaborate metal footrest,
waited several million years
for Buzz to bounce across the lunar dust
in gravity-free slow motion.
Only to be denied
the relief of cleanly mown follicles
and find instead a puny flag
and the imprints of space suit boots,
gawking at each one’s calligraphy
of elevations and depressions
as if it were the wax seal of a haughty divinity
stamped into his vast and crumbling desert.
He raised his face,
jaws gulping soundless rage,
the big blue planet, as ever,
mocking him over the horizon.
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The Lure
i.m., a mate
If you hadn’t begun to look at her
with more intensity than a workmate’s glance,
if desire hadn’t used your gift of language as a lure
and the talk had remained casual,
passing the nine to five with pleasantries and banter,
if you hadn’t touched her hand that day over coffee
and stayed instead with the quiet, fair haired woman
and the son who waddled down the hall
to grab your legs and squeal
when you came in at night,
would the years have taken you
through a hundred beds, the lifeblood
of wine and vodka, the essential cigarette,
those brilliant all night conversations
in that legendary ocean apartment,
a stag’s magnificent horns
the centrepiece on your balcony overlooking the beach
to celebrate seduction, macho glory, and the bounty of the seventies,
then down the decades to a boarding house,
drinking with other wrecked and angry men, the presence
of women, the necessity of their subtle strength, impossible,
smashed aside by alcohol’s flailing at ghosts,
the daily labour of poverty, cirrhosis,
your legs swollen like a sumo’s with fluid,
the whites of your eyes a diabolical dank yellow,
then the years diminishing rapidly
to a day in a curtain drenched room,
just a few houses away from where you lived with her,
the one you gambled past and future on,
to the moment rising from the bed,
urgently, as if called, clutching the sheets
as the paroxysm stunned you like a bullet,
slammed with the surge
of ten thousand nights of drinking
roaring from one swallow,
and you gasped on the floor alone.
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