Monkey Business
We don’t. Put it in a vow,
put it in the diary, I’ll meet you
as arranged. Take your pick
from the usual places: the red café
near the railway arches, the motorway
where the yellow sodium flares.
You’re right to wonder if they deserve us.
You’re right that sadness capsizes things:
the way you replay ten, twenty years
and how you might have spent them.
But as with backstroke swimmers
who collide head on, tell me
is anyone really to blame? Personally,
I imagine it as a screwball comedy:
running frantically between taxis, losing
hats off the back of toll ferries, trailing
papers and angry bosses in our wake.
You play the blonde, I’m the hack writer.
Someone hide the monkey,
here comes the professor. Easy
to get caught up in the reckless energy:
the endless disguises, hotel check-ins,
fraught meetings in the back of car parks
maybe a run in with the police. And don’t start
with the others in all of this: how he
is gets toyed with by a cult refugee
and she seems drown in her family.
Perhaps they should meet.
Someone hide the professor
here comes the monkey.
You know how these films go:
they end with a marriage. So where
does that leave us? Rewinding it all back,
I think we spoiled the beginning.