Two poems from "Pottymouth", an illustrated book of poems. 'What I was thinking about when I should have been minding the kids.'
$15. Contact Mick at perthartscompany.com.au
The waiters
On candelabraed, white-draped tables,
In a snow-bound restaurant,
(A barn of a place on the other side of town)
In a country that was never mapped,
The fingers of discarded thoughts tap and tap
As they wait and wait for waiters
To bring news of dates who won’t show up.
Still young, coiffeured, bibbed and tuckered, itching for a dance
These memories have lost the minds from which they sprang.
They check their watches.
It’s a long night for these exs of the late-demented:
Pearl-necklaced, evening-gowned,
They sit around and curse the geriatrics
In whose young dreams they’d played.
Some didn’t even see the light of day:
Peacocks on the ballroom floor of a girl’s pillow,
They’d been forgotten come the morning
And now have bugger all to do.
The love notes scrawled on walls at school,
Faraway eyes in the typing pool,
A shop assistant’s reverie,
A bottled message lost at sea,
The wasted days of boxers, head-the-balls and drunks,
The mislaid hours of glued-up punks;
These memories have lost the minds from which they sprang.
Ragged-arsed or swathed in sable,
They tap their fingers on the candelabraed, white-draped tables,
Trapped in a snow-bound barn.
In another country
An older woman taps her walking stick along the pavement.
She stops, surveys the clouds,
“Looks like snow.”
She should go home, but no:
She ducks into McDonalds,
Orders tea,
“Oh, and while I think of it young man…
A peacock sandwich please."
And life is sweet
Just the one light on
Inside the abandoned ice rink of my head,
Where a single lady skater, wrapped for winter,
Glides figures of eight.
For company,
She holds her own hands in woolly gloves behind her back.
Round and round,
The only sounds some tune she hums
And the quiet crunch of the passing of the years.
That’s all there is between my ears this morning
And life is sweet.
