Everything That Nearly Happened

I watched a programme recently:
a boy puts his finger to anything
dead and brings it back to life.

But, when he does this
the neighbour slumps down,
dead, hosepipe whipping the lawn.

When I was watching it
I felt an empty bathtub
pressing against my skin,

I could taste rice beer,
smell charred pork and lime,
hear the motorbike taxis gathering

like mosquitoes outside the window
and that was the way I knew
it was morning.

That night,
I had stoppered the door
with my back, I, the only one in the hotel,

as they each, in turn, pushed against
the door, rice wine knocking,
then nothing.

So I locked
my body in the bathroom
sat up in the tub imagining the distance

from my balcony to the road,
to the tourist district,
to the

morning
when my friends would return
from the island and I could tell them everything.

When their bus arrived, one of them looked down
at me and shook her head, as if to say:
no, put your smile away.

-

In the second episode of this show
a cop finds out what the kid can do,
but he kills another guy on the toilet

by keeping a girl he knew once
and who’s father had died
because he saved his mother.

-

The first thing to come off the bus were two bare feet,
then two ripped legs in a dress that had been blue,
with my two friends holding her up.

After it had happened,
the doctor had arrived,
dirt ridden into his hands.

He stitched her without anaesthetic.
As he was doing this the police brought back
her bloodied shoes, said: she’s never been there.

I didn’t ask her how many there were,
how they’d dragged her up the stairs or
if she’d imagined the distance from the third floor.

I just brought her mango shakes in the morning
and told the cyclo driver in basic Vietnamese
above her screaming: that she was very sad
so he was not to help her up the stairs.

When she got back to England they pulled
each stitch out, started again
and I never told them everything
that nearly happened, but didn’t.