From the big screen, and larger than life for a week or two,

which is all a tangent universe can stand,

we take them home and introduce them to our modest living quarters.
Their baby blues stare out at us at all hours of the day and night,

prompting every manner of ridiculous thought, such as:

‘The world is small’; or ‘What if Elvis could have taken to my mother?’;
‘I will ride across the desert on a purple roan, or some such,

for anything is possible’; and even that old chestnut,

‘There is only one for everyone alive.’ The cat mewls
at its perpetually empty bowl, the work piles up on the desk,

but we simply say, with a new-found recklessness:

‘This is not the most important thing in my life right now’;
‘you’re a predator, catch your own’. We exist

in the bubble of our making, our souls glistening like celluloid,

by turns rock bottom and on fire. What causes it to disappear?
Who can know, but one day we double-take to find ourselves

filing them away in the rack of lost hopes

with the show-jumping videos and ‘twelve easy tunes for classical guitar’,
the cat purring as it settles on the easy chair, as if to say

‘What then, what then’, the sky sucking back its thunder-claps

and storm winds, saving only one small cloud, which loiters there,
putty grey, shedding rain like tiny lead balloons

on the pristine terraces. And somewhere else a universe explodes.


First published in The Squirrels are Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2010)