Then Matthew was also laughing.
Hah hah hah, Ava. I was golden buzzing
and untouchable. Nothing mattered –
matters…
Perhaps, Ava,
I might have been more careful with myself,
had I not been living in that basement –
supreme numbness,
underling.
What I’m trying to say – what I’m attempting to
explain is why I took them home, Ava – both men.
Agrodolce
It just didn’t seem to matter if the bitter came along.
Those diggers, Ava, dug their own graves
then drove in
were driven
aren’t we all
and, Ava, in that concrete coffin of a
room we –
well I don’t need to say, do I?
I woke up very early, sore, head still fuzzy,
crept into the kitchen.
There was a window in there, the only
window in that flat – it faced a wall so close it seemed
bricked-up,
but still the light squeezed through, Ava,
I could hear the sour man’s hacking cough,
a pigeon cooing, scrabbling on a ledge,
I got a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer,
stuffed them down my pants, and stood there
in a daze.
He wheezed, he coughed again.
You know what I was thinking about, Ava?
In that greyish light, beneath that house that held three
different flats, three different lives above my own half-life,
a pack of frozen peas betwixt my legs,
I was thinking of the time an orchestra – a good
one – visited our school on some sort of outreach
programme.
A composing workshop.
