Within a tired old cafe over shiny bun and tea

There waits a withered memory that is still a part of me

Its old engagement long fulfilled for better or for worse

Its hopes and fears too dim for recollection to rehearse

And yet its presence haunts me like a half-remembered curse.

The chipped Formica table tops where tea-rings slowly dried

The mindless buzz of city traffic edging by outside

The flies that specked the window-pane, the scrape of shifting seats

Another of a narrow lifetime’s disappointing treats

Gone stale before it started its parade of slow repeats.

The smell of cigarettes that fouled the faintly greasy air

The jitter of fluorescent lights, a radio’s tinny blare

And at the centre nothing but an anxious sense of time

Conspiring with the sights and sounds, the softly settling grime

In some as yet unplanned or long forgotten cosmic crime.

I never left that cafe where there opened up for me

The flaw that runs through world and soul, too broad or deep to see

That damns our expectations to their Sisyphean fate

And traps us in the places where our dog-end gods await

To tell us that we came too soon and went away too late.