Someone Poem by Oliver Roberts

I never imagined
it would happen like this.
Three seats away from me
in a dark cinema, you,
alone.
It had been almost six months;
the time between the release
of those terrible half shadows
from my mouth, in a nightmare
inhabited by clowns,
my excrutiating declarations
prying into the eyes I had adored,
stroking their stunned weeping.

There is little I remember from that day,
maybe
only the way the reeds had a
drunken nausea from the sun, or the way
the people who walked by
with their dogs
looked at us as if they were reading
the last poignant pages of a book.
Your hair then was just like it is now
as you sit as close to me as far away;
it displays no signs of injury,
no wounds
among its black swirling mass,
no indication that all of you was once
split in two, by me, beside a lake
on a Saturday in late November.

Now, in decapitated glances,
I take you in again.
That diligent Mediterranean profile
of burnt black seed,
nose sweeping
towards an indiscernable edge
like a pack of renegade stars;
lips of yoghurt
and four o' clock thunder storms,
cheeks threatening
to dropp large tropical fruit
at the incidence of a smile.
Your smile. Do you still?
When? How often?
Would you if you saw me now?
That you are here
with no one beside you
would be better for me if I knew
that you knew for certain
that I once loved you,
that to try and forget about you
would be an ambitious pursuit.
Yes, I no longer think of you
every day but
I have wondered about this meeting,
fearful of returning to the very spot
where I'd left you for dead.

People are still arriving,
taking their seats around us,
possessing, in their anonimity,
what we once had and then lost
in a reminent sadness of burnt leaves.
Between the histories of our kisses
and the fables of how we made love
lies a gap as imagined and real
as that of a child's hand
reaching up to catch the moon.
Now I daren't even look at you,
someone
whose skeleton I once borrowed,
someone
whose birds I let fly
through my seasonal solitudes.
I get up and move four rows above
and you are lost in the darkness.
I hope you never saw me.