Papermate
A bleak midwinter’s day in June
icy winds descend the flume,
sweep the soot throughout the room
and the usual tunes
recycle through your head, don’t they?
Ah, something from A Hard Day’s Night, perhaps,
You Can’t Do That, If I Fell,
You Should’ve Known Better
and what’s that smell?
Yes, from the range, steam,
what a choker,
neck twisted, expertly broke,
there’ll be a feast
for here’s a potful of grease,
a slaughtered goose cooked -
and wasn’t there a game called that
one Christmas?
You’d balance plastic figures,
multicoloured - long before
that was even a thing
on a fake saucepan lid,
watch it pivoting,
shivering - imagine waters boiling
before plunging in,
and what’s sauce for the goose,
is sauce - well, you know.
Now you remember
that sheaf of paper
thrust into your hands,
like an afterthought before a forethought,
or barely any thought at all -
maybe it was half a ream;
late paper for paper's mate.
You’d been feeling sick -
a rare day off school,
swinging the lead, they’d say,
on your birthday -
pigheaded, thick-eared,
depressed heat oppressed brain,
still, mustn't complain
about feeling the strain,
tired of watching your back,
in this war of attrition
of constant attack
and the forces ranged against you?
Unequal in the extreme.
Such Masters of Risk,
rattling beads, rattling cups,
throwing six, throwing up,
positioned up mountains, marching plains,
searching subterranean homesick drains
to winkle you out
with a cocktail stick.
Gaddafi’s final chukka.
Run through, pricked,
adorning half a grapefruit -
a sandwiched chump
skewered beneath a pineapple chunk
and somewhere up north from cheese,
make it Edam, please,
something synthetic.
The table’s set,
under flickers of candelabra
that never quite banished
Herman’s creeping dark,
five places, six faces -
it’s all vanished
won’t come back, now,
within your fog - lost,
buried beneath ice and frost.
But on peeling paper, by the door,
if you peer hard enough,
it can still be seen -
sticky brown residual trickles,
where a grenade
of homemade pickles,
was hurled and smashed
above his head,
shattered into smithereens, it’s said.
Careful, now, here’s sentiment,
pinpricks the hairs on skin,
rising forensically to dust glasses
for onion peelings,
ripped up grasses,
rippling the drink
to swim in the water within.
Still, your turn for a good one.
Strange words, these, off-hand
like a refusal to commit,
delivered in steel and grit
through teeth, not lips,
and you’re left holding
these 250 sheets approximately,
like Queen Jane.
The paper’s plain
but ready to be typed upon
receive an imprint.
I can still see you
holding that pale, blue lidded
Smith Corona in something like light,
as though you’d just learnt to write.
And later, in the relative
safety of the trenches, delight,
mapping plans for flight -
while you never could win this fight,
there’s always tomorrow.
A strategic withdrawal,
you could claim,
although, to be more mundane,
truth is, there’s never choice,
only later, when you found a voice,
you expressed sorrow.
As for what happened next,
well, it served its time,
saw action, fought campaigns:
those keys were well-worn
by the time all doors were knocked
latches lifted and unlocked -
going with you as you travelled.
Before my ink ribbons unravel
or are replaced,
just this - you told them
about the typewriter -
and they asked you with a sneer at school,
was it a Petite?
But, looking back,
it was anything but that.
