More on The Evil One

The Evil One is the 'codename' I have given to the great Lost Love of my life, someone I have mentioned a few times before on this blog: an elegant, feisty (stark raving bonkers) Australian academic. It may not seem a very flattering appellation (a more recent ex-girlfriend was chiding me about this the other day, fretting that she might undergo a similarly denigratory rebranding), but I assure you it is meant jokingly, affectionately. I think she would, in fact, have been perversely proud of it. She did like to see herself as a tormentor of men, once even likening herself to Estella in 'Great Expectations' - raised from earliest childhood to wreak revenge on the entire male gender!

I knew things were going to be difficult right from the outset because she told me she wasn't interested in a "relationship"..... but would give me two weeks of wild, no-strings-attached sex. I turned her down. We ended up dating - fitfully - for nearly 6 months. Crazy times. Wonderful times. Anguished times.

Anyway, to add to last week's poem on that relationship, here's the one I composed challenging the 'two week time limit'. Well, actually, it was composed much later in the relationship - but looking back on that rocky start, trying to build something positive out of it.

a method of counting


you gave me a fortnight
(at best)
wary of happiness
or convinced
that you would bore me
and I you
you said 14 days
and no more

but I prefer to count the nights
I am actually with you
14 nights
in your arms, in your bed

or better yet
to count the hours
that I spend with you:
whole hours only
not the aggregate of stolen moments
minutes here and half-hours there
the cursory morning farewells
the street-corner chats and hurried cappuccinos
or those public gatherings where
I must pretend that we are strangers
(though lightning forks between us
with each glance)
but hours
whole hours alone together

and when I have counted
my 336 hours
I will ask you
for another fortnight