literature

people-watching

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Literature Text

I like watching people in public places,
peering through proverbial windows at snippets of
other people’s memories, times they will remember, saying:
I know exactly where I was when -
times they will forget, saying:  
Was it a Tuesday or a Thursday? Was it raining? Snowing?

I like sitting in coffee shops and libraries and train stations,
watching moments of other existences briefly intercept my timeline,
letting my path almost cross with someone else’s but
always remaining a spectator, a ghost, a nameless face as a background blur
to the couple arguing between the aisles, the boy buying flowers for some beautiful
blonde girl waiting at the end of the train tracks, the child tugging his mother’s hand,
'Look, look, birds are flying mummy, birds are flying.'

These are the times I am sat still, letting other people’s worlds gravitate around, orbit past
my own, centred on a bench and a book and an empty hour in the day.
There are times where I am moving, on planes or trains or buses, watching people
stuck in freeze-frames, in tableaux, juddering past me like strobe lights.
These are the times where I cannot interfere, cannot catch a balloon slipping from
a young girl’s grasp, cannot let the threads of my unwinding trail tangle with another’s
and become a forgotten face, hidden in their subconscious.

In the planes and trains and buses I am separate, I am distinct. I cannot even cast a
second glance at an old man bent double hobbling home on this cold January morning,
paper rolled under his arm like a lover’s and I wonder where is his wife, where is his walking stick.
But maybe that paper, that trip every day to the local cornershop is his crux, his crutch, his cane;
I cannot even risk blinking because the scenes will flash by, lost to my retinas, lost to my
unconscious memory, if I blink I would miss the woman crying down the phone,
umbrella tumbling to her side as our bus shuttles past mechanically, as if
the glass pane between us has become a snow-globe around her, around me.
We all just stare, we do not stop. There is something melancholic in this,
and somehow it is the faces melting past the rain-streaked and finger-smeared glass
of this train of this car of this taxi of this tram that haunt my memory.

I forget the tangled hands of a pair of newlyweds talking across the coffee table,
letting their fingers flap like a dove’s wings, I forget the cries of joy from a mother,
paper sign slipping from her grasp as her daughter steps into the arrival hall and
glides past me with red raw eyes and a suitcase marked one way only.
Instead, it is the things that lie beyond my reach, the people shivering at bus stops,
the farmers trudging over roiling country fields in search of a lost lamb; it is
that old man and that woman that re-emerge from the mist of my memories
to echo and solidify in my dreams, in my thoughts and now in my writing.

I build them a universe and a story and names and fill in the details I missed, like
how the old man’s coat was tweed, with a navy cotton trim, with two brass buttons,
the third missing and lying on his bedside table, because she was the one that sewed and
since she died he doesn’t have the strength to open her treasure trove of a sewing box,
scared that it will make him remember the way her fingers looped and spun in the
long summer evenings when he flung the veranda doors open and hummed
their wedding song over and over as she sewed and repaired and mended
with a small smile that curved just so, that curved just so -
how the woman had received an unexpected call from a family friend, an emergency contact
and that, in a choked up voice, she told her that her son was in hospital, had been
on his way to school with some friends when another driver swerved, when a tree
loomed, and on impact, she said, on impact her son had thrown his arm across his friend’s chest,
trying to hold him back from slamming his head into the dashboard.

I have crafted them a world where I can connect, can manipulate, can alter their fates
to fit a happier ending and yet it does nothing to alleviate this guilt
that I didn’t just leap off of the bus at the next stop and do something
because my imagination won’t change a thing and their lives keep unravelling
before them in a mess of threads and paths and disjointed road maps without
a sign, a navigator, a friendly stranger to guide them.
I wonder who has seen me from their car window and had to do this too,
has had to lodge me in an alien story, has had to stitch me a different coat and
and a different laugh and a different reason for
letting our lives touch without blending; I wonder who’s dreams I have haunted
with my head low and my music loud, I wonder when we will all learn to carry rocks
ready to break through the snow-globes and reach and reach and-

I like watching people in public places,
seeing the side of them that is free from pretence,
seeing the moments they will forget,
I treasure these moments for them, because I’ve always been
a hoarder and maybe one day these moments will become my own,
will become our own, will become the things we share when the walls crumble
and we let our feet walk the same path for just a little while, when I stop being
a spectator and you stop being a stranger and we greet each other like old friends
meeting at last.
8/12/14
this might be the first thing I've written in a couple of months that I'm really proud of. (It woke me up in the middle of the night demanding to be typed, demanding to be unravelled, demanded to be told. It was a commandeering poem but hey, I can't complain.)

Featured: Love Is Christmas
From the Treasure Chest #4: comatose-comet
© 2014 - 2024 comatose-comet
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SnowStormNinja24's avatar
This is so, so beautiful. :clap:
I've often wondered, too, about the lives of people I see or what people think when they see me.