wordsout by godfrey rust
Welcome
To The Real World <
46
of 59 >
31.12.99
In
the afternoon we pushed
through the
funfair on the Mall,
went twice on one of the less
gravitationally-challenging rides,
saw
a tv personality on a
big screen
in the sunset in
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,
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.
© Godfrey Rust 2000, godfrey@wordsout.co.uk. See here for permissions.