The third character sat in a corner
as we ate our lunch.
I was munching and brooding on my morning's reading,
my girl was bubbling with satisfaction
having successfully cooked the tomato and mushroom dish,
and outside it was raining.
Thirty hours of light and steady,
the edge of some typhoon somewhere,
thick sweet tomato sauce,
radical syntax in an authentic middle-class voice,
the third character.
A monkey and a dog and an elephant,
who had been busy
helping me teach twelve yr olds,
shelter'd 'neath a bridge of concrete,
with the guys on bicycles.
The kids had been happy to accept
that the elephant sometimes wore dark glasses
read newspapers and that the monkey listened to music
on her mp3-player,
but there had been mutterings
about the dog eating bananas.
Sigh
The third character is a ghost or a fairy
a pigment of my imagination,
colouring my reality.
Too much LCD, my eyes swim.
I don't, in this dirty sea.
