CRIME FICTION
Why this fiction,
the bookshops
packed with deaths
browsed on shopping trips.
The frisson of vanishing,
dangled by lanyards
or dumped when read
on beach towels.
The humming of violence.
I've seen such men
in parched gardens,
faces lit by a late sun.
They search for victims
or just company as
I read my Maigret
or Ripley.
It's some sickness
we share - the only
fables now made.
And I’ve looked
for a lost child,
desperate, speeding
the wrong way past
a darkening park,
shouting her name
over empty fields.
One second was enough,
let alone a novel.


...yet still we turn the pages as if rehearsing loss might spare us from it.