Futuro: Why hasn’t he turned up?

In a stranger’s house I look in a mirror

it hangs over a sideboard     whose sideboard?

a cloth in a sink    ragged featured

that is the face of the stranger I see

who is not who I imagined

*

The Future: here we are but where is it?

The tang of zebra stripes evapourates.

This is a sort of island surrounded by mist.

A befogged candle-lit dinner.  The roses gleam.

And brushing through the air like feathers: the bus.

And a mind shrunk to the margins of a wood.

“The story that’s emerging is there is no story!”

*

And a man who jumped down the stairs when he was ten.

And at dawn the orange bowl and it is full of fruits

that find their echo in how I once shouted at a wall

and it is full of blue apples     the stripes of a zebra fish

are splashed again

with the effect of the moth torn curtains.

Tags: The Future