Transparent Words - Poetry

 

 

Best of Friends

by Ian Brook

 

Only when the wind is in the wrong direction

Does he wake and want me dead. Years back

We wouldn't have believed any of this could happen -

Just placing it aside like a book never got round to,

A drawful of spirits, handed over freely and not to our taste.

Of course I'm sure glad to see him, for dinner or a drink or two,

But gladder when he's gone again, back to the apartment,

With his bottle and his alarmclock taking silence where it belongs.

 

And I never saw him again. Except the once, that winter

Sunday outside the station. Backlit by the sun

But still strangely dull, as if the whole scene got anaesthetised

By the people who slipped from his side.