Cinema Poem

by Tom Harding

Saturday 6th August 2011 8:36 pm

 

We’d go to the cinema in the afternoons

Then for coffee later.

She’d studied film for four years

And when discussing it afterward

She sounded like a police mortician

Diagnosing the cause of death,

The more lavish and Hollywood the affair

The more bloated the corpse,

“Exposition, complication, climax”

She'd say and draw a curved line on a napkin

Depicting the three stages of composition.

One day she said,

“Only life can teach us how things explode”

And it was true I thought-

Most men drop dead

In the middle of their story or

Have nothing resembling a story at all.

When she finally left

I carried on visiting the cinema in the afternoon

I sat so long in the dark

That my senses grew confused

The most simple story perplexed me

I found myself laughing at death scenes

And weeping at the jokes.

Even years later the random sight 

Of falling buildings and planes

Had similar effect,

Now nothing made sense at all

No matter how well explained and 

Beautiful the arc.