Danger!
Survivors will be prosecuted.
Don’t try to refute
the assertion.
It’s certain they will be. And
sent to jail
if they fail to be run down by
a train: it seems
insane to you, no doubt, but I
will shout
the message from the rooftops
if necessary:
Survivors will be prosecuted!
What is a survivor after all? A
tennis ball
that has been returned over the
net of life
in the court of strife. We are all
playing the
same game for negligible gain,
served badly,
sadly bouncing,
enduring our trajectory quietly,
almost alone,
while others unseen, unknown,
make a racquet.
But that has nothing to do with
trains, does it?
When players are in training in
hope of gaining
victory, they don’t train on rails.
The wheels they
spin are psychological only and
on a whim they
glide to their desired destination
without any fuss,
frictionless fictions: if you don’t
like my depiction
of their methods, please evict me.
Cast me out
of this poem: eject me from the
locomotive
with a shovel or a shove. I know
how to handle
the uneasy teasings of exile. This
won’t be the
first time I have been shunned by
my own words,
shunted aside, ruthlessly booted.
Nonetheless I
remain determined enough to cry
beyond the sky:
Survivors will be prosecuted! Yes,
it’s inevitable.
If you don’t want to face the judge
then cease to
exist. I insist that’s the only way of
avoiding jail:
only by failing to breathe and move
can you prove
your immunity from blame. It’s the
most serious
game anyone ever lost or won. Even
the sun sinks
at the end of days, a blushing hush.
And it looks like the head of a flaring
stick blooming
into a quick universe of its very own,
the tip of one
of those wooden lengths used to light
the pipes of
gentlemen in days gone by. Game, set
and match!
The sun has set, the game has met its
match, plots
hatch, but who’s to say it’s the same
sun that rises
every day? Arguably it’s a fresh one.
In the same way that a ghost is a new
human, risen on
the horizon of the cycle of life. And by
the way, what a
fabulous cycle that is! So many gears
to help the tears
pour down the cheeks of years, months
and weeks. The
saddle is uncomfortable, true enough,
and the ride is
rough along an unpaved path, but just
consider the lilies
in the fields as you trundle past them.
Enough of these comparisons please!
I have drifted
away from the main issue, which is that
survivors will
be prosecuted, without mercy, tersely
sentenced to a
dull paragraph of turgid prose. Even if
they scraped
off their noses with a near miss, they’ll
be jailed. No
transgressors shall be forgiven anything
and why should
they? The rules are clear, nearly clichés.
Destiny can’t steer
away if you don’t give it a chance. A
glancing blow will
let you know the truth of the situation.
The signals at
this station are uncompromising: best
not to devise
an escape from fate. Danger! You’ll be
prosecuted while
rooted to the spot. How many warned
you? A lot. No
point dissembling at this juncture: train
wheels never puncture.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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