Celebrity Triptych
by David Sergeant
I
Once upon a time, where light is beautiful,
Their gazes met as everybody watched;
The camera breathed upon them and the dutiful
Director wept and looked down at his watch.
She was slender, blissful, twenty-two,
A glamour-stalk with eyes as sweet as spring;
He was handsome, humourful and flew
A combat fighter when he played Our King.
A marriage! Witness them upon the beach,
The blurred exposure of her apple breasts,
Whose beauty is the password-prompt he answers
With bison thighs and picture-perfect chest.
O zephyrs sweet, extol them to our reach!
Around them sports cars stop and act like mirrors.
II
Lightning pricks the mantle scars of earth
And thunder rolls; our poets now bring word
Of separation, how their love gave birth
To viciousness, to hearts burst into shards.
Her friends confide he went to pieces mentally,
Ate eggs and coke and shat inside her sink,
And came back late, transformed, and breached her anally
While she, bewildered, tried to do his thing.
But darkness whispers of another truth,
Of how her wandering legs burst from his mind
And flirted with the guy who played Babe Ruth
And waved him forwards to her sweet behind.
Atomised, they sweep away like rain:
O dripping fingers, suckle us with pain!
III
Exposed. Not dead, because death fixes,
But banished from the empire of our sight
To wander now like ghosts amongst the spaces
Beneath the shifting walls of daily type.
But they'll emerge, like butterflies in spring,
That god who dies and then performs his thing.
Can you picture? The image as it's printed,
The glamour-crinkle of the turning page,
Which testifies how their return is minted
And circulates amongst your daily wage.
They live a different life from us, you know:
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Between each other, back and forth they go,
And love all night as we would love to do.
David Sergeant was born in 1979 and grew up in West Cornwall, England. He has worked as a civil servant, bookseller, teacher, waiter, barman and circus tent erector, and is currently a lecturer in English at Oxford. His first poetry collection will be published by Shearsman Books in 2010.