Getting to Know Each Other By Jim Higo

We sat on the sofa and she stared deep into my eyes; pleading, searching, demanding, with a probing glare that looked for answers from deep within my soul, like a rape victim meeting her attacker (I should point out that that is purely a fictitious metaphor). She said, 'Tell me what it is. Explain it to me and then maybe, just maybe, we can sort things out'. So I said, Ok I will

I said, It's more depressing than a fridge without beer, It's more depressing than Germaine Greer, It's more depressing than a day spent on Blackpool pier. It's more depressing than House repossession, It's more depressing than a death bed confession, It's more depressing than the economic implications, of a global recession. It's more depressing than National pride, It's more depressing than a friend's suicide, It's more depressing than mass genocide. It's more depressing than a freezing cold bath, It's more depressing than Sylvia Plath, It's more depressing than hearing somebody use the word 'math'. It's more depressing than an evening of swing, It's more depressing than a paedophile ring, It's more depressing than finding that your partner and your best friend have been having a fling. It's more depressing than losing your hair, It's more depressing than Cherie Blair, It's more depressing than Cher, It's more depressing than drinking alone, It's more depressing than being on a train and having to listen to people talking in a ridiculously loud voice on a mobile phone, It's more depressing than watching a loved one dying of cancer, until they are little more than skin and bone. But she looked at me, unconvinced, and I knew that she still didn't understand. So I tried one last time, I said Imagine all the things that have ever made you miserable in your entire life. Imagine every one of these things, constantly haunting you. Imagine a great carousel of gloom and wretchedness, a never ending vortex of desolation and despair that spins around you, a gamekeeper's snare that traps you and keeps you held in a permanent state of agony and suffering. Well that's what it's like, when you make me watch The X Factor.

Copyright © Jim Higo 2009

This poem can also be read on iPoetry, the poetry app for the iphone/ipod touch available on the Apple iTunes App Store.

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