We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the town’s sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.

Life’s not moving.

We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months’ old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.

We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.

One day soon we’ll be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice.
But right there we’re young, we count
our money carefully, we laugh so hard
and drop our forks.

We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying onions.