You are, we are, I am

A pilots pocket catches on the autopilot switch,
A surgeon dips for incision and slips.
A mountain guide clocks the map upside-down
and here is no water, only rock.
A man slips in the bathroom and it goes all the way in.
A gambler’s ball scuttles back to black.
A child falls off the roof out the back.
A dendrologist hacks down the world’s oldest tree.
The facts had no back up:
And I am a fuck up.
Of course you are, we are, I am.

Take minutes while the mushroom clouds bloom in your eyelids,
The heat of armpits, the musk of primates,
stomach drop like a car off a bridge,
while the girl in the passenger seat fumbles the gear stick.
We are the apex of pyramids of ancestral ‘I did this’,
And each monkey admits, he is imperfect.
And of course you are, we are, I am.

The office is a safari of signage,
piranas in water coolers, tigers in filing cabinets
anarchy in in-trays, foyers and contracts,
tectonic plates held steady with systems,
procedures against love and lust, volcanoes and weather,
you cannot throw stationary, lanyards,
spreadsheets down to feed chaos.
You think this is order, and you can control it,
and of course you do, we do, I do.

You little perfectionists, blinkered like thoroughbreds,
collapse the card house,
drip oil into the gulf like vinegarette,
you economists singing on the edge of the abyss
do not know how to see the world as it isn’t.
You cannot remember the past
and think the future will build monuments.
And it wont, we won’t, I wont.
So we sit, with cheshire pub-table grins
savouring failures like ash-less cigars.
Instead of - and that's why you shouldn't eat those berries –
Its, and that’s why I am glad I am not him.
And we tell these things, because we can imagine,
what its like to be someone else, in some other place
standing in a doorway, an outline of grace,
realising there is no such thing as death and glory. Just death.

The ghosts of pilots spool from black boxes,
there is still disaster, health and safety heretics
battling god complexes, a small series of arm movements
leading to a smoking hole in the skin of a city,
and an attempt to jigsaw lessons from ‘I’m sorry’,
and of course you are. We are. I am.

We are standing on the shoulders of our great mistakes
and we should celebrate, in stadiums,
our faces radiant with permanent marker
our foreheads beaming messages
of the moment we realised which switch we just flipped
the ice beneath our feet cracking into continents
and written on us in a hopeful epitaph
‘there is no way back, but the future will forgive.’
And of course it will. We will. I will.