Now showing

And we'll meet
and I'll be there in a blouse that blows slightly open
like a sentence I left incomplete a year ago
that for once...
…you didn't finish
and you,
with eyes that will
skim like stones
over a hundred yard stare

It's the appeal of those little backwater town cinemas
that used to be theatres. We'll smile but with arms folded
as we file past 'Now Showing'
feeling like neither of us ever will. We'll try to find something appropriate
but something or other will always push us back into a situation
where we're sat
still
in the dark
next to each other
staring forward
watching a romantic interest develop for a hundred and twenty minutes. In the darkness
we're most comfortable, looking on,
as if in a world outside the universe
at how these things called humans love. Well I don't know my love
and I don't know if we'll ever be seen by anyone
on the silver screen.

Silhouettes will perform
pirouettes
to a dialogue we know by now. Female lead will spike up with, 'I just never knew
what to say...!'
and I'll mime her words in your direction,
with a conviction
no B Class starlet could fake. You'll answer back, 'My dear...
we're more alike
than you could have possibly known...' with an emotional intimacy
that would have rows six to twenty blubbing like school girls
if only
they
had
seen.

'Of course the
cinematography
was exquisite, and
the casting couldn't be faulted, but I just felt that
elements of the plot were re-hashed
vignettes from old French cinema,' our exiting shoes will say
dragging in step
with laces teased to fall open. It's the last scene
and there's just
so much script
left to get through. Take your places. Exit all stage left,
stage right,
down alleys
and out of sight. Excepting two young leads
in the dead of night.

'It was a good film,' I'll say.
'Yeah, not bad,' you'll say.
'We could write it much better,' I'll say.
'We'd make it so sad,' you'll say,
'that everyone would leave wanting to kill themselves.'
And then we'll laugh.

And then we'll go back
to our respective homes
trying desperately to write this movie
to be the only one we like
with a happy ending.