' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' The Rest Of The Story(For Scarlett) Poem by Dónall Dempsey

The dried up lake
contrived to look both

surprised & embarrassed

like a lady in a bad dream
wearing no clothes

whilst singing in church
or doing the supermarket shop.

When I say 'lake'
I mean the body of water

that lived up
in the old quarry.

It always gave us kids
nightmares.

Our parents
always warned us not to

go there
...but go there

we always did 'cos
it was dangerous.

And that was its
attraction.

Danger
barely tamed and still feral.

It would give us the creeps
just looking at it in sunlight.

The police tape
looked real pretty

fluttering in the slight breeze
like an art installation

that everyone who was
someone

deemed important
without knowing its meaning

or if
it had one.

But hey what do I know?

The lake
wore its dead body

like a cheap glass ring
pretending it was diamond.

When I say dead body
I mean skeleton.

The skeleton
wore concrete shoes

as if it had stepped straight from
a corny gangster movie

riddled
with cliché.

It just grinned
at the police

flash photography
as if it were a celebrity

famous for being
a celebrity.

He still wore
a heavy gold crucifix

on a thick chain
around its neck

that shone in the sun.

The sun smiled down
as if it were smiling down

on a picnic
or an ordinary walk in the park

as if it were innocent
of the things it seen.

'Hey, I'm Summer
being Summer...! '
it seemed to say

'Dead guy eh...what a bummer! '

The dead guy
was alive in his death

as if he were soaking up
being the center of attention.

And yeah sure
it was just another ordinary Summer

when I was 9 or ten
or something like that

but this was just
the beginning of the story...

...the rest of the story
was somewhere else.