The Past is another country…

…so why do we still travel in its shade?

Yesterday would have been my brother’s birthday and I thought about it on and off all day. Memories came and went like visitors in rain-splattered macs carrying variously, ice-cream, smiles, beer and fists.

How different would things be; would we be, if… but I realise that there is no ‘if’ really. It is all what it is, and it is what it is, because it was what it was and there is no use fretting about it, feeling guilty about it or worse, resentful about it.

So tomorrow. Throw off the mac and stride naked and proud through the streets of London? Or maybe just stride inside the usual clothes, just naked inside like most everyone else, having to exist within whatever shell God, grace and genetics has gifted us. When I look at people in passing (not those that catch the eye for their pretty shells) but just in passing, I wonder sometimes who is really inside, looking back. Who they are. What they are, what they were and why.

Just as I do when I look in the mirror.

Hello to you
face in the mirror;
tidy man in your suit and tie
with the button undone
just there so the soft spot is naked and exposed
did you mean to do that?

Why are you smiling?
that button is a signal –
the soft pulse crying out ‘touch me’
and when your eyes do just that
I feel them like a finger stroke
run down below the belt

where there’s nothing
beneath the braces
and the shirt-tails tickle the soft spots
that no one else can see
in a still, erotic memory.

Tomorrow is another country too. Passport ready.