The poignancy of Suzy Chan

She lives in Birmingham, this single mother

named Suzy Chan, waiting for a bus,

an insignificant life, woven into the concrete 

conurbation, in this post-modernist time, 

and the bus is late, and she is resigned at the stop, 

concentrating on a Stephen King novel,

( the one about the evil clown that lives in the sewers ).

And it's late in the afternoon in Birmingham,

that time of day when infants are waking from naps

and office workers are looking at clocks.

Suzy Chan is nearly twenty-nine,

and her afternoon bus is never on time.

Meanwhile, I am in the sprawl of London,

obscurely contemplating life

through cosmopolitan window panoramas,

thinking about the surfeit of poignancy

washing about out there on the streets,

muddled up in the miasma of countless dioramas

And I get a sudden image of Suzy Chan.

Nothing sensational, just respectful,

mindful of what is there, in Birmingham perhaps,

or maybe even anywhere.

Then this young man comes walking along,

i-pod swinging on a musical umbilical,

passes close to Suzy Chan;

and she notices, whilst reading and looking for the bus,

through the powers of female peripheral vision,

that he gave her a second look,

a serious reality check, nothing trivial.

And whilst turning the page she absently thinks

that not so many years ago,

the young guy would have looked back yet again.

But this is now, and that was then,

when she was a regular

three-look problem for many men.

She has an eight-year-old son called Joshua,

they've arranged to meet at four-thirty

outside the school gates,

he'll be waiting as usual,

the bus is always a little late,

his shoes are always a little dirty,

but he will smile widely 

at the sight of his mother,

and as they walk home through the

sun streaked, late afternoon streets

they will giggle contentedly together,

and decide mutually on something nice for supper.

I feel respect for women such as Suzy Chan,

not tainted by powerful sentiment, rather,

she embraces other peoples views of how to live a life,

of what is right and what is wrong.

And those feelings are important,

and can be experienced by anyone,

perhaps another writer,

in another grand metropolis,

might be imagining her right here and now.

There is a warm breeze blowing up the avenue,

gently riffling Suzy Chan's back pages

as the bus arrives in a fuss of engine noise 

and well-oiled gears;

and on this street in Birmingham,

in this brief urban afternoon,

Suzy folds the corner of the page, 

thinking to herself

long days make even longer years,

wistful, as she gets on the bus,

and disappears.

Reviews

[R J Askew]

Love the 'surfeit of poignancy'. And the portraiture of two lives, the one contemplating the other and itself, obliquely. It's not a case of which is best. It just is as it is. There also seems a pairing of writers, the poet and the mighty S.King. Who is the Clown laughing at? I can hear him now. But the poet wins because there is more intensity in the sixty odd lines of the poem-story word machine than in a novel. The killing joke is that poets never get read though. I like the dismount with the bus ride into oblivion seeming like the ordinary life of millions. Meanwhile the fate of the great is to be left standing there - watching but never quite being. A wonderful word dance.