25 July 2012
With a receding evening sweat
From the Olympic cross-Kings Cross
200m civil-servant-dash:
Shirtsleeves, brogues, overweight laptop bag
And a phantom-of-the-opera
Dichotomy, though that is too easy to say,
Forming in sunburn across my brow.
The dry summary of 5 pints
And a late bottle of water
Sits in front of me
On the whistled materialisation of a sequence of missed trains,
Which reminded me to mention younger years
When I missed them all.
And, as I weave a bubble with my touch-type-thumbs,
I've shut out the unrelated sniffles from the window seat,
Drawn down the armrest
Like a shutter to the dusk;
Detachment is easy,
Which is the crux of it really -
That makes the engagement acute:
As always, the detail and the questions
That are always "whats" and "whys,"
Yet these answers are a holiday
With near-strangers you readily confide in
As timeshare best friends:
You've an alcoholic subordinate,
In an organisation full of parasites gone to seed
And you let things run too
With a car in a car park full of new security guards;
Your father died
In the middle of the course,
But you finished training,
Having said nothing to no-one but us and the world afterwards.
It's funny how you react
We said,
Reviling the husband labelled Aspergers
That didn't ask about the lump,
Or the funeral,
And we talked about your wives:
There were two:
With the first you raised children,
With the second: a rescue chihuahua, later
It sounded functional;
The question about holiday logistics
Led to a serving of families
Like spaghetti,
My own unspoken, yet related,
As good conversations go:
With the next part already on your lips, in reserve.
The martial art was Aikido,
Though I recollected at an inappropriate juncture
That saw it lost amongst our sea of words:
Amongst your bass guitar,
The exact location of North Dorset,
The measure of personal safety that one could expect in a town such as Nottingham,
With it's inconsiderate inaccessibility from the northwest,
Between the constant bleep of your texts
The pronounced gap between GCSE's and A-levels,
A disappointing public realisation that your teenagers were all in their 20s,
And I didn't mind; I was just glad to have remembered that it was Aikido,
After going quiet to think about empathy
Whilst you speculated as to the flashing truck driver's motives.
That's where it comes from:
This withdrawal for detail;
That's the armrest I draw down,
And the silence over the flip-chart when you'd spelt "openness" with one "n,"
Because the book had too.
We laughed at my summary of feedback advice as:
"Give out positive sandwiches,
But don't force-feed people,
And always cater for other dietary requirements
on your management buffet."
Well, most of us;
Sorry about that.
I recollect the sun on the pavement,
The eye contact post-sunglasses,
And the course pack someone left on the pile of bags
That I'll send sometime to the one we reckoned it was,
In return for souvenir scrawls from carefree Defence-estate nurseries
Of drawing trains constraining good company,
With its talk about the definition of alcoholism,
And the lack of prejudice in the new generation,
That as a cynic I considered hypothetical,
With a rueful handshake goodbye and a grin that rues the fact that
it was fun whilst it lasted.
Still, I wonder whether you got to Euston in time,
Having left 5 mins before me
for a train that left 15 mins earlier,
As I depart.
En route • Opuss № I