The Other Shoe

Did I read it a long time ago
Maybe I wrote it in the not so distant
A hammer or shoe was falling
Not real, not in one version
Or, perhaps any for that matter
I sound like I missed the point
It wasn’t about hammers, shoes or footsteps
Not really, honestly,
I have to say they felt a little real to me
Did other people feel reality
Was it closing in suffocating soul and life
For someone else, somewhere other than here

The point was, for one of the writers anyway
Is that shoes come in pairs
I vaguely wonder if they could write that today
In that offhand ableist way
You could avoid their point for a while
But it sits there, no cares
Shoes are made in pairs

I argue with some ferocity in mind
Shoes do not fall in pairs
Thinking hard of when shoes fell in my life
Justifying to myself it was only one that ever fell
And the nagging fraction of doubting seconds
Invades the rapture I call resistance
The memory of the synapse that flares

There is no power to suppress the truth
That lives inside your head
I know the shoe for whom it listens
The pair, the inevitable fall
From graces not firmly bound
If ever they were found
Ask my mind if it would be so kind
No remorse, the cruelty of time

Wait and sit, then wait some more
What do I know about the rain
Where it goes or where it was once before
School told me it was a cycle
There is no comfort in cycles anymore
More curse than redemption,
Condemnation of that eternal

Should I be peaceful that I sit not alone
Each date passing to deathly sorrow
Where a friend could once have stood
Instead the mindful forgetting
Blended and aged with wilful neglect
With words of remembrance
This moment cares not for mortal regret

Time still passing and burning,
No change for the winter, or ice in your soul
Books and their wisdom
Make sniggers for the idle of minds
Some hours for the bored and their wives
Would you ask, remember for thee
The shoes in their pairs and my lost analogy

My hiding in rhyme and pretence I mistake as panache
Movember’s forgotten moustache is January’s laugh
I remember the reason and why I am here
But not why I stayed
Why l listen in stillness for what I won’t hear
Ask why I care, and where is the emotion to find
Is despair, a well refilled in a cycle
Water of death, decay, choke out the life
Till the other shoe falls and we can lie dead
Lifeless and done till somebody cares