
He turns to the woman behind him in the queue and says:
Life is like a bicycle ⸺ when you stop pedalling, it stops.
She disagrees, instinctively,
and so do I from further down the line (but
do I really, deep down?)
I think that
sometimes there is beauty that can take my breath away,
but mainly there’s just breath,
a slow and steady intake
of whatever’s taking place in time.
What he really meant to say was that our lives have become machine-like
and full of desperation, that work
is a rat-race destructive of any genuine sense of achievement
(but it could be so much more),
and that any thought of change is crushed by the constant threat of failure,
but by the time I managed to think of all this
it was too late to tell him ⸺
out loud.
Photograph: 香港東平洲 Tung Ping Chau, Hong Kong (2016)