#3 (In Watermelon Sugar)
When the tigers were in bloom, the tigers helped me
with my arithmetic. I threw it away, so
not even time
could find it, and drank
whisky
made from forgotten things. That’s what we did
in those days. When the last tiger
was killed
the birds refused to fly
over the abandoned bridge. In regular glass
at the bottom of whisky
we spent a lot of time
by ourselves. Tomorrow the sun
would be black, soundless.
David Roberts is a writer, poet, artist and filmmaker who currently lives in Sheffield. His short fiction has appeared at Sein und Werden and Hoax amongst other places. Twitter: @djohnroberts
Author’s note: This is part of an ongoing sequence, the aim of which is to distill or translate each of Richard Brautigan’s novels into a poem. Phrases have been found whole or spliced together before being shaped into poems.