The Stranger

He simply disappeared!
The man, that man, he just vanished!
He only left behind an ashtray spilling over with cigarette butts
And
An old ink stained copy of ‘In Search of Lost Time’
A third empty bottle of whisky ,
A mirror framed in green plastic reflecting razorblade sunlight stealing
Through the cracks of the solitary window painted black
And a tireless trail of careless words about love and other such illusions,
Not all his own, not all unknown,
That now flurry about the garden fence like wanderlust;
Streaks of silver under a glassy midnight sky.

He only left behind
A human body that had cracked up white and begun to fade like an old photograph
That hung loose and limp and still from the ceiling fan framed by the solitary dark window pane.
He had dark, sad eyes, that took the longest to fade.

Everyone said he was from another city, another country, another time!
But the truth really is that he was from a borrowed time,
A lost time.
One that we never really want to remember,
Or talk about on candleglow evenings of drunken shadows morphing on the wall,
(which is not hypocritical because everyone else is doing it too and everybody knows that everyone is doing it and no one really gives a shit anymore.)
Like
Slumdogs on multimilliondollar Technicolor postmodern mutual cocksucking extravaganzas.
Like shitting in a strange toilet,
Like fucking a strange woman,
Spitting out a choice of endless post colonial dirtywetchats sans smiley. Or sometimes with.

They said he finally got what he was waiting for,
But that’s what they said the last time too
And look what came of it.
I’d like to know if it was worth the wait.
I wonder if
This time the light had dimmed to a soft glow;
Was there a flicker of the candleflame
Making the shadows on the wall start suddenly,
If only a bit?

Nobody is very sure when exactly he disappeared
The precise moment, or hour, or even day.
Somewhere in between the two weekends
He slipped away while no one was looking.
Nobody realised that he had until it was too late
To do anything about it.

Except wonder aloud between wine drenched conversations
About the man of borrowed values
Living in a borrowed time
On borrowed sofas and borrowed beds
Mostly alone but sometimes with borrowed lovers and wives,
Who also sometimes let him borrow their friends and their cars.
Sometimes I wonder if he even existed;
But then I remember the trail of careless words
And the limp and cracked up pale body
Framed by the blacked out window.

It was that warm June after you had all left for good
And I hung around a while in old rundown pubs on solitary afternoons
Eating kebab rolls and drinking beer with shots of vodka.
I met him, you could say, on my way out.
Most things that summer; the sky, the steaming roads and the lost faces and eyes on the street
Had feathered edges and bled profusely into each other.
He sat otherworldly, dark and solid in the midst of this watercolour impression
Of another rundown bar, complete with cobwebbed chandeliers and time tattered oriental rugs.
He sat playing slow jazz on a piano long out of tune,
The notes quivered and flowed into each other like a failing memory
Cursed to hang in the air like swirling mid day dust waiting to be forgotten.
Except this one note a seventh of C on the last octave around which he lingered
And then stabbed at it, sudden and perverse.
Over and over.