We Didn’t Mean to Put a Lid

 

We Didn’t Mean to Put a Lid

 

Does she wonder if she gets what she pays for?

You’d doubt it.

Flying ultra budget,

because hey we’re going to Majorca

on Coconut Airways

and now she’ll take them on,

best the corporate beast,

trouser some pocket change at the very least.

The lawyer’s on it -

it’s lucky how she’s a nurse

or else it might've been that much worse -

could’ve been a child, after all.

Well – if any right thinker

would trust their offspring

to gadgets made from sealing wax and string,

with leg room fit to swing

a noosed gnat.

Daddy, daddy, we didn’t mean to go to sea,

so let’s make grown-up noise

like how, years ago, I read we’d take

a cheap 18th Century packet,

from Dover to Calais, toss and turn -

or walk beside a mired mail coach

up Shooters Hill, puffing away,

beside grime spattered draft horses,

a 6-up hitch stuck in courses

over-topped with mud;

how we’d push the hind boot

to help breast the peak.

Ah, look, she’s gone and got burnt.

That hot coffee with malice aforethought

has slopped; viciously plopped

onto her lap – how it dropped

its load, she cannot in all conscience say.

We didn’t mean to put a lid

or we did if we had, but the budgets don’t run,

still, not much worse than the sun

might ask of your skin.

Lucky, she’s a medic though,

because flight attendants haven’t a clue

these days and she’s lost her words

for surface wipes or dry paper towels.

At the time, she howled,

but later, kipping on a sunbed, poolside,

not prepared to put a lid on it

and all of a loose lipped

cat, rat, bag - thinks how they could sink ships

and, having nursed her thoughts

took the whole kit and kaboodle to court.