My Poem About Love

An orange, still-framed evening saw
Us sitting by the council creek
Discussing funds, the rocky shore,
The hinting winds of rising weeks.

I’d knocked off work and met you there,
Eyes swimming in a sketching book,
Your pen expressing mirror-clear
How spent the city pigeons look.

‘I went with school when I was five,
And took home an anemone.’
‘Christ,’ I replied, ‘was it alive?’
You grinned all sweetness. ‘Possibly.’

We sat there endless, out of time.
The sun, unmoved, sat with us too.
Light floated in our palms and eyes.
The water froze in golden blue.

‘Next pay, let’s go to Satay King;
Try get a double decker bus.’
‘I’d love to. We’ll see everything,
The low roads rolling, just for us.’

Tucked in my mind, I find that life
Can hide within a tiny square —
A careful locket’s constant sight
As painted by a single hair.

We’re sitting in that evening still,
Secure inside its gilded glow:
A promise statically fulfilled,
A secret world that never goes.

A stiff and aching centipede
is imbedded in my arm,
clasped to the bone, asleep.
For about six weeks they reckon.
Then, I must gently wake him
in physio, stretching him slowly,
coaxing him to go. (I’d hung up
at the top and flailed down five feet,
my elbow grimly reconfiguring
beneath my bodyweight. But how
he snuck in, I’ll never know.) At night
he glimmers dully, his reflexive pincers
spiking my sleep. Leggy rotter. In a codeine
dream we face off atop a hellish pillar
and as he seethes towards me I yank out
my terrifying mega-sword and slice the fiend
sausagelike until he’s so many segments,
oozing around my boots. Thus unimpeded,
I ascend placidly through an upper pinhole
into milky warmth, where all is painless,
soft and clean… But centipedes do not die,
not really. None of the small and squirmy do.
They creep a retreat, nest in dirty nothings
and resume their wet equations, festering
onward. Once this little imp scurries
out of me there’ll only be another
ready to nestle in somewhere: a slug
in my coldy nose, a slater curling
in my cramping toe. What point is there
in moaning? We’re botchjobs. We’re jellies
without shells. We won’t be here long.
Subtly, through aches and ailments,
the immutables are sending signs.

Frailty

Bob van Beek (he/him) reads incessantly and sometimes writes his own things too. He recently graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a BA in English literature and psychology, and currently resides nestlike in the peaceful, valleyed bosom of Upper Hutt.