All He'Ll Remember Poem by Jake Kraweckyj

Tonight was a bitter night and
Shania Twain thumps a song behind him.
The hair underneath his sequin shirt is up.
Someone’s sprinkled cold glitter on the benches.
His eyelids are closing on their own now.
He stops for a minute and thinks how they’ve grown,
like his pupils
which he doesn’t need to teach anymore.
They know which way to look,
when not to doze,
and they know just as well how to distort everything.
He’s looking through a kaleidoscope tonight.
The National Library whirls through his vision,
a huge scholarly block of chalk.
He likes it, though the stench of dead plants
and that half-alive smell behind the wheelie bins
makes him gag.
Or that could be the cheap gin
and sickly bubbled tonic repeating on him.
It glowed steadily under the UV light tonight,
like an Emperor scorpion in a glass.
He descends the stairs to his house
and laughs to himself; all the sheep look like
this girl he knew at uni,
right down to the bad fringe.
They met again tonight, for the first time
in fifteen years.
Her fringe was just as slant, her breath
still tasted like old limes.
He sits on the side of the fence and wonders
if reunions are there to reunify old desires,
neuroses, or to show that
people are timeless.
Tonight was a bitter night.