Monday, August 01, 2005

17 syllables

My mate Nigel's going through one of those 'sad and lonely' phases we all go through from time to time. For the last few weeks, when I've stayed over, we've crashed out to the strains of Have you ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with)? - thanks so much Pete Shelley.

Eventually something snapped, the inevitable happened, and he slept with the wrong woman. It was partly my fault; she seemed like a gift at first sight, and I kinda propelled her his way, but then neither of us knew she was the wrong woman. We should both have listened to her better; she wanted something permanent, which is the last thing on his mind at present, sad and lonely or not. As things are, we're both guilty as sin and hoping she wasn't unduly upset at his instinctively blunt reaction to her too-early mention of the R word. I have to say I'd have reacted in exactly the same way he did; relationships aren't something you have, like a house, they're something that happen, like the weather, and there's something odd about asking someone else whether you can have one. But I guess that's why we're friends...

Nigel is a little nervous and twitchy since that night, particularly when it grows dark, expecting retribution to strike him down in increasingly obscure and macabre ways. So I'm publishing the slightly non-traditional haiku we wrote tonight to mark the occasion, and to remind him of the aftermath next time there's a next time. It's named Bunny Boiler, after that scene in Fatal Attraction:
shotgun window head exploding
spattered wall my brain
death (probably)

(NB I should make it very clear at this point that the lady in question is a pleasant person who is entirely unlikely to do any such thing :)

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