Imposters

 

Imposters

 

Look, look, and look again –

to find yourself here,

grasping an actual canker of the ear

and something rotten 

in the state –

sticky mattresses, up late

in gym kits, trainers, 

where work clothes could be

more appropriate –

readying that trip to the sea.

 

Chucked-on pairs of bathers,

a three-pack trousered

in varieties of flavour;

life preserver, inflatable ring, armbands –

rolled in mildewed towels,

then scratching sand

from between fusty toes,

flexing like the cat

upon a hot tin litter tray.

 

Here’s one refusing to play,

just the one, mind.

Caught reading a book

if you please,

The Two Towers –

not on Kindle, but your paperback;

to be or not to be, and all that

jazz, and whether it is noble to bear

and you stare, shocked –

it is in your memory, locked,

barred against a thief

that steals away the brain,

as if it's all just games.

 

Here’s that self-same,

going beyond their prescription, 

has ticked off more

than those three 

he was forced to pour

into his thwarted imagining.

By illiterate tutors

with work-shy brains –

drinkers, pukers, clubbers, grubbers –

think Patrick Star, 

bleached curls,

and Lazy Ways by The Marine Girls.

 

Just because you can

doesn’t mean you should,

he might reply –

antediluvian, before the flood –

if you asked him, 

which you won’t.

 

It might be a mirage,

a note never wrote,

a tempted fate –

one swallowed summer 

that nothing brings,

so hide behind curtains as she sings,

sings willow, willow,

my garlands shall bring

a blanched nation,

a sun-blocked generation

an absolute nothing

bedecked in g-strings.