Never Flown
Stacy was so close to leaving the ground,
She could feel her wings lifting,
Her feet, she knew, were off the tarmac,
And then Mark did his blink-blink-blink thing,
Shook out his hair in that way of his,
Affected yet endearing,
When released from his man bun,
And told her that, no, he hadn’t flown either.
And down she came with a screech,
Tires burning like Doc Brown’s Delorean,
Because she’d heard him say he’d been to Singapore
And he was wearing the Yosemite T-shirt right now
And wasn’t there a photo over there on the mantelpiece
Of him on that holiday to Venice?
Yes. Yes, there was. He was on a gondola.
He’d not gone all the way to Venice on a gondola.
So she’d told him she had never flown.
And he had thought, “yeah, me neither,”
Because he meant — Oh, God — he meant as a pilot, didn’t he?
He thought her ambition was to fly the bloody plane
Instead of, say, overcome the vertigo
And the restricted life chances
That made up her faulty flight plan.
That meant she had never flown at all.
“We’ll get to fly one day,” Mark told her,
His quiff fully in agreement with him,
Taking flight on its own as a mirror to his confidence.
“Yeah,” Stacy told him. “Maybe we will.”
By the end of the evening, of course, Stacy would determine
Never to go anywhere ever again.
There’d be no chance at all of flight,
When she’d put herself back in the hanger.
