Speakers of half-finished sentences
live in the small details. They listen to Clair De Lune
over a car radio and smile and feel sad and remember.
They see a van for the Snowflake Laundry
and imagine a room of bubbles and singing women.
Purity touches them. Whatever they do
it will never be good enough. Hope is killing them.
They say ‘I’ve never seen the attraction of…’
before someone talks over them. Listeners are theoretical.
They’re the vanishing people in Marty McFly’s photograph,
smiling like idiots, in danger of never being born.
On office phones they say ‘I love you’, as they gaze
through tall windows and see everything that isn’t there.
They smile at young people at the edge of busy roads,
dressed as cardboard boxes and advertising pizza.
They want to leave their sensible cars and star-jump
with them in mizzling rain, ‘I’d like to join you but…’