WordsOut poems
by
31.12.99
In the afternoon we pushed through the
funfair on the Mall,
went twice on one of the less gravitationally-challenging rides,
and rode back on the Piccadilly Line for the early evening service at St Mary’s,
where a few dozen sat quietly to hear
the old familiar promises
and shrug off the weight of resolutions unmade or unkept—
a conspiracy of silence with the shared
alibi of being human—
travelling back later for the fireworks with thousands making determined
pilgrimage
and looking for meaning in the rollover
of figures,
gazing upwards into the sky
not at an apocalypse bursting like bombs
above
but a harmless display, famous for fifteen minutes, visible from outer space
to catch the eye of any passing god
accepting worshippers at this point in time,
while down here each watches from his or her vantage point—
myidentity@anywhere.com in y2k version
1.0—
as the digital nightmare of the 21st century opens up like a lapdancer:
on Millennium Eve a planetful of
celebrants exiled from one another
search for something which is not found in the image of the couple at
the woman pleading and brushing away
tears,
the man’s face immobile, set against the unattainable truth of a century’s high
water mark,
the notion All you need is love—
stupid, naïve in execution if not in concept,
a cry of hope vanishing in bangs and
flashes:
as we escape, the virus of the old century is smuggled in in the bloodstream of
the new.