Now

 

Now

 

 

Did you ever wonder if someone’s now

is the same now as yours? Or how

it could be, at the moment you leave,

that they might simply cease to be,

and it becomes ever harder to believe

that’s a person that you may’ve kissed,

or touched them while they still exist.

Only this morning, standing on a piazza

you wondered if you were even present

by the roundabout’s wheeling windmills,

absent of people wrapped against chill,

and their rackety silence of sounds still.

Does it take a scuffed puff of pigeons

pecking at falling pastry flakes in rings

around your feet and clattering wings

to bring back all those songs he sings?

Something in black - that solitary crow,

in amongst them all - but standing off,

you know there are not birds enough

in your heart, one is much like another,

interchangeable and therefore not proof

even one rook preening can look aloof.

You could always call, if you’d a number

but they change, they’re redistributed,

voices are muffled and tones are muted,

screens blink until they’re pinprick voids,

then, once you’ve hung up your phone,

it clicks, it drones, it’s instantly alone

and there’s no real way you’ll ever know.

Yes, there were once holes in his hands

but they closed, nothing in there grows,

you drilled there, you raked, you hoed,

but seeds planted are dandelion clocks

whisked away by mist; dashed on rocks

that only exist because your mind insists

it’s so. Yet even these thoughts are within

someone else’s head who’s thinking them,

therefore the distance between grows.

You’re the speck centring horizon’s brink,

and someone’s lost every time you blink,

wandered before you’d even time to think.

Did you ever wonder if someone’s now,

is the same now as yours? Take his hand;

blow a looking glass from grains of sand.