The Pulse of Life

A plastic football
red and green, sprrrrrrrri-zzles into space.
Is skywards bound. A small boy's face,
a moon, near full, with beams to spare - he
having dribbled it along the street
then let it run into the road
and seen it trapped (half trapped, perhaps)
between the tarmac and a tyre,
then squirted out and higher now
than he has seen it yet, I'm sure.

What is he thinking, the small boy?
Of space ships? Moon shots? U.F.Os.?
A fraction of a second and he rumbles something's wrong,
spots jags in the trajectory?
Then as it falls, the way it falls... something about...
not the way a football falls... a magazine, 
a flier from the take-away,
something that opens out and flaps and jigs from side to side. 
He picks it up and walks away.
It's obvious he's near to tears.

I'm leaving you, dear reader, to decide
if now we're moving to a different narrative -
or simply to a darkening of this.

I must have seen the small girl sitting on the kerb, 
but had not registered the same. She's watched the boy,
she's seen what happened to the ball,
yet now she rolls her doll between two cars -
except it will not roll. She kicks it viciously.
It slides, form lost, a bundle now,
into a motorcycle-sidecar combination's path.
The motorcyclist sticks on all his anchors
and the bike acts crazily: zig-zags, the way 
the football had. It judders to a grinding halt,
the third wheel crushing the doll's head.

He's leaning on his handlebars and breathing hard,
the motorcyclist who had thought a child was running out.
The small girl gathers up the pieces of the broken head,
distributes them around her pockets. Gently cradles
headless dolly in her arms and takes her pulse.
She grins. She'll live, she says, and skips off down the road.