Angela (and other poems)
Egg
We rounded on the egg which hadn’t been there yesterday. It was warm and scratching indicated we should get to the point soon. It was a colour and shape but more apposite was how everyone was more interested in it than I was.
We know you did it, everyone says. But this wasn’t true. Or, I wasn’t aware of the truth.
In considering the egg we all share one incident from our youth which had stuck, to be replayed even now, though when interrogated is empty. Like a blown egg.
We talk of short cuts, something an auntie said, wall paper and rotten wood in a porch. When we’ve all had a turn we look at the egg. A crack has opened and it is dark inside. Which is an end in itself.
Executive
I love the containers more than what is contained, but this isn’t unusual. All my friends climb trees to talk to birds and try to explain the issue. No one wants to take responsibility for the council offices and the meetings being prepared – every room is full of councillors and they wait until midnight, sometimes later, sharpening pencils and thrumming through diaries. Condensation runs down the windows. If I were you I’d pay attention, but I’m not so do what you like. I’m not listening and don’t intend to hang around on this level. I’ve heard there are more opportunities down the road and round the corner so I’m saving my breath and look at my doodling. Clouds and hurricanes and cyclones and twin typhoons of arrows indicate either fortune or cracked destiny, depending on how well balanced your intake is.
Angela
Just to show off, or win an argument, or just out of spite, Angela would die in meetings. It became a joke in the staff room – did you know who did you know what, again? I would be embarrassed. I could die better than she can. But she was ingenious. And she had done her homework.
On such and such a day she would clutch at her shin and froth and expire and only later would one of us Google the date and find out a tribal elder had lost a battle to retain his ancestral soil having been shot in the shin which lead to an embolism on this day. On October 29th she threw herself from the window singing Billie Holiday’s Gloomy Sunday. December 9th and she turned into shadow. Last week, she was ripped into quarters.
I tell my friends I wish I had something. Not this, but a way to be me.
You could be born in meetings, Owen suggests.
What about tiptoeing away when the conversation turns to profit and loss? Dougal said.
None of them said, don’t worry. It’s been raining and more is forecast. Join the whole world in the queue to get home and once there interrogate the night as it gains confidence in the corners, in the black slit where the bookcase hides in plain view against the wall.
None of them said, become expert at forgetting, because that is the endpoint and society rewards those in a rush. If you can forget in the right way you could live in several worlds, simultaneously capitalising on and rejecting loss. The way you have never acknowledged any of our heart aches is suggestive of aptitude.
Then one of them said so.