The Long Photograph
Who are you all,
Sitting there in serried rows,
Imprinted in pale sepia?
My time arrow going forwards,
Yours still stuck in past mode.
Names tantalise and tease
Somewhere, deep in the annals of my mind.
Dusty books rarely rummaged through.
Though quotes appear from then,
Sometimes, without warning.
“The Posse.”
Each member, distinctly and impossibly evil without knowing why.
Us, the comprehensive ones,
You, the sweet faced bitches,
You public-schooled us in the ways of your lives.
You hounded the boys away,
Corralled them with vicious barbs.
Made their lives so miserable that they fled.
Once gone there was one sore thumb left.
So you had your fun with me.
Sent to Coventry for speaking out of turn,
Sent to Coventry aged twenty
By my ‘intellectual peers’.
I don’t recall ever being that childish.
You fire bombed us, those young naïve children.
Blew us away with your pettiness.
I wonder if you ever grew up.
Probably not as nothing destroyed you.
Time blurs edgy memories made of diamond.
Forged in the volcanic stresses of experience.
Jewelled memories in the raw gold setting of the psyche.
There you reside
My time arrow going forwards,
Yours still stuck in past mode.
My past adorning the future,
The insatiably desiring thing that it is.
JD 2000