Jump

Jump

 

You go to poke your finger in my mouth as I yawn at the breakfast table and I think:

what if I just threw my tea down your front?

 

I think of doing this without malice,

not to spite you

but just because I could.

 

I tell you this and you laugh,

a hiccup of a laugh, through a mock scowl and

tell me that yesterday you thought of

chucking your phone into the station fountain,

not as a protest to the modern condition 

or to see how people would react,

just because you could.

 

***

 

These impulses are like the warped love child of

Freud's ‘death instinct’: the drive that seeks to lead organic life back into the inanimate state,

and Jung's ‘shadow’: the unconscious aspects of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.

 

These murky primal instincts betray in us

a time before civilisation and social convention,

not so much cogito ergo sum,

as cogito ergo fació.

  

They are housed in the tiny voids that exist between thought and action,

never seriously entertained, but each

in their own small way,

with the power to bring the world to its knees

if acted upon collectively.

 

***

 

We stood under a steel sky and threw conkers in the fountain,

watching them dance in the jets;

the seed of a possibility.

 

 

 

You wore my duffle coat and

said it’s like a hug in a jacket.

The duffle coat bought in secondary school

for a rapidly growing boy,

who never quite came to fill it out.

 

You said if I ever died you would forever wear that jacket to feel my arms around you.

  

What if we all just jumped?

 

Reviews

[ANTO]

I was really intrigued by this title (was reading it over on the weebly but half of its missing mate?) - so i came over here to finish reading it - and Im glad I did.
I laughed from start to middle - then I went - hold on a sec - is that the bloody thing that makes me feel like jumping off bridges and cliffs - just wee thoughts but they are powerful enough to make me back away from the cliff or bridge lol.
This is funny and edu-mac-ational William, which I love. So yeah - I love this. Its cool.
Sort the weebly out lol !!

[William Arthur]

Every poem has a button that says 'read more' on the bottom right to bring up thre rest of the poem.... did you not see that (in which case i need to make it more obvious) or did you click it but it didnt display anything? glad you liked it in the end though :-)