Image: Michael Geiger (via Unsplash)
My wife’s copies of Vogue
And Glamour will be collector’s items
Someday, each going for an arm
And a leg. Or so she tells me.
Right now they’re just piled up,
Abjectly unread, on our Ikea footrest,
Waiting to be doused in petrol
And torched. I’ll be honest,
The thought of doing so often crosses
My mind, as well as hoping the Ikea
Footrest’ll go up with them in smoke.
But then, I’m quick to notice flammable
things. Ah, sure, look. A man can dream.
Like, say, when I sit in our kitchen-cum-
Study, the kettle fuming in the corner
Like a rival I’ve bested in a debate,
On a Saturday mid-afternoon, hungover,
As sunlight licks the dusty floorboards
And a black cat mews into my window
For some affection it gets nowhere else,
And the steel-capped stomp of the people
In the flat above ours walking
Overhead like an out-of-sync timpani solo
And I grit my teeth. I’ve had words
With them before about the noise
To little effect, ’cause they keep making it.
And don’t even get me started on the landlady.
Fear not, though; my own appetite
For destruction was called off
Long ago, all murderous impulse
Medicated into the good, clean,
Half-hazy calm of trips to Tesco,
And alarms set for 7 am;
I’m nothing, no threat to anyone
Or anything you can name.
Just a house angel, another model citizen
With the steadiest of incomes earned
From working the safest, most remote of jobs.
But should the tides ever rise
And mountains implode
Before we make it to safe ground,
Know this and only this:
It’ll be me who laughs wildly as the smoke
Thickens over the city’s
Toppled rubble and siren wail
And ash-choked air,
Trudging through the glorious wreckage…
Yes, I’ll be there,
Gnashing the sight with my smile,
Blood leaking down my jaw.
Yes, I’ll be there, just as I am here.
© Copyright Daniel Wade, 2018.