by Chris Buchanan
Poetry, 2010

—

No? You honestly have no regrets?
No, I guess you’d have no use for them.
You look near-perfect to me, well except
for maybe your singing, and even then
you do it stylishly. Everything paid
and sipped from tiny bottles, like your gin.
Yesterday’s losses loudly swept away,
your fleeting doubts banished with ‘no’ again.

I wish I felt the same about regrets.
I wish I’d stopped the trolley-bloke, just now,
and a had a drink myself, to just forget
like you with your rien. Perfect and proud.
But next time, love, I shan’t just let him go
with such a simple, sorry answer, ‘No’.