Phantasm

─ ‘this one goes out to the one I love/
this one goes out to the one I’ve left behind’ – REM

the oppressiveness of Saturday afternoons
air in empty layers
traps houses, walls, gardens in a lethargy of propriety.

Even the dog is listless.
He sprawls ragged in the hollow left below the strelitzia palm.

the washing machine churns
purposefully

but around it the silence seeps
like a slow toxin

there is no breeze to stir the leaves of the wild ginger plant
its creamy flower droops, edged by a roughness of brown.

The room has abandoned itself -
there is nobody here.

the woman at the computer writing
is a cipher –
she does not really exist –

touch her
and your hand will pass straight through her,

as if she were smoke,
mist,
something vanishing fast.

Becoming nothing.

31.5