Five Things

A couple on the platform, presumably together. The white trainers have been dirty, and cleaned, and it shows. The indentation on my finger from the ring that dear girl gave me, on my orders, has become a sore, newly. The headlights are not like diamonds, the brake lights are not like coals. We are concerned for the team.

These two would not be demonstrative, although they once were, when it began. The whiteness, by dint of being cleaned, has gone in its creases to its underneath dullness. My hand will float up if I take the ring off now. Everything is not going faster than normal. Is everything propitious to their, our, success?

They live in a house of square spaces rendered by the arrangement of square blocks now. From the ventilation holes, wrinkles spread; in them, the silt of wearing. I often consider throwing it away, upwards. Although neither has it been slowed down. What can we do?

They keep on, near each other, in the kitchen, in the carriage, doing things. Not the laces, but the stitching, which was of the same white and flush to the plastic leather composite panelling, has now collected shadows of dirt. My finger has grown around it’s fit like a tree knotting around planks. But time can be made subject to camera settings. Perhaps less scrutiny, less expectation, more applause at what they do well.

Such lovely days they had, near to each other, not knowing. The laces are just frayed. Maybe the bone has changed too. Pins of light can be made into snakes – that’s worthy of framing. Because their mentality is wrong.

Sometimes they were apart. The plastic end fobbing, which makes them insertable, has come off. How deep the constriction goes, who knows? Night time motion and lights captured and rendered for you. They seem to think that simply by dint of being at this club they will win things, because of its history and its stature in the game.

She would ring him or he her. Relacing them is a bugger. My digit has grown against it. Really, you should pay to look at it. It just makes for a remarkably dull game.

They would paint pictures of themselves to each other down the phone lines. Actually I don’t wear them that much any more, they make my feet smell. The knuckle beneath the ring looks outsized and requires snapping. It is something you’ve seen, transformed, after all. And it makes us, the fans, feel less together.

She with her eyes closed, he looking in the mirror. I tend just to prop them up on the sill of the train carriage and write about them, nowadays. But the colour of the skin, no matter the weather, always looks right against its beaten silver. And that means the way you see is transformed too. As a team, their lack of movement and of imagination is particularly embarrassing in light of their main rivals’ excoriating (not a word I got from the football press) form.

Sound carries them together. Or wear them for cycling, when it doesn’t matter. Beneath the ring, the hairs are babyish and white. You imagine more with your eyes. In a sense, the way they make us argue now, about how they could improve, does unify us.

She comes with his distinctive gasps, he pretends to be simultaneous with her peculiar gurgle. Usually they just sit in the cupboard. I keep it on because the white is beautiful as it is known. The photograph makes you look harder normally. But it’s not a unity we want.

They are together. And they really do smell. Each dent proves time, unspecifically. Why the cars can’t just be cars I’ll never know. We are concerned.