modest pendant
A small person in a giant world
shuffles into his fluorescent-lit garage, smelling faintly of oil and smoke and hours of
professionals tampering with his car’s limits, and skirts into his midnight stallion.
He reverses and eases on the brakes with a feather step and pushes through the red empty dashboard light with the accelerator.
The street unfurls like his first ex into the grey housing of suburbia before it ramps off into a station.
His first ex; a ballerina
famous for how many times she could pirouette en pointe without slipping
Or tripping or even missing a glance
and when she danced everyone watched her but she only watched the man in navy blue
with the grey tie and the black dress shoes polished from tip to toe-tip.
The man, hand filled with the minuteness of a cigarette, within the midnight stallion
in the midnight blue suit with the moon grey tie and star white shirt whispers
as quiet and meaningless to the attendant in front of him as the wind in dry grass.
He pulls out a thin, golden card and petrol leaks into the creaks of his car
and jumping forward like a wild beast it sneaks out of the garage
as if the memory of its arrival had already begun to sneak away into the night.
The first time he quit; a ginger-haired man
he’d worked the rounds for long enough to see the grey in his fickle sideburns
and his moustache turn yellow with the memories of a cigar and whiskey and a comforter —
a habit he picked up from his boss after the first ex.
And like his own damn son that man raised him
to climb mountains and trap and fish the streams and forests
because if there was ever any good will left in this world he wanted to give that to his “son”.
They laid flowers together on dead wife graves, passing daisies
onto the empty and forgotten moss-filled stones
that looked just as ready to be buried as the skeletons that lay beneath them.
But he smelt like a Diabetic smells after an insulin shot and a toilet break
so he left.
He leaves a trail of smoke in the convex mirror of his midnight stallion
and rides on like a trotting horse - not slow but not leaving his stallion out of breath.
The very drone of the engine crafted of gilded metal silences the bells and whistles
and blows of wind and cries of babies that murmur and run through the night
like children playing Army and flying in Spitfires
that they once saw hanging from thick iron wires from the top of a museum building.
He breathes a sigh of dirty, cold hospital parking lot air that reminds him of the past.
waxen creek