Poa-Tetry Soup (The Name Inspired)
Thoughts melt and distil under a green/blue flame,
Swirling down, separated out and mixed.
If you’ve seen it, it’s broken;
If you’ve heard it, it’s shredded;
If you’ve read it, it’s rewritten.
It's really quite unlikely to be fixed.
You’re cutting up holiday snaps
and pasting them onto card.
And you’re scrambling madly
to hide the mess on the floor
As your mum yells for cleanliness
From behind your bedroom door.
3001 puzzle pieces and you’re jamming them together,
No wonder your imagination is at the end of its tether.
You’ve got two pieces that are sun-kissed clouds
“What comes… what comes next?”
You’ve got two roots in the soil
“What comes… what comes next?”
Your mother is sitting in the hall
With a scarf tied round her neck,
Her back pressed up against the wall
As she deals the jigsaw deck.
3001 pieces in her hands,
Mixed with childhood drawings
And grains of sand.
She lays out seven in a line,
Which you place between the two and two.
“Oh, but that and that won’t rhyme!”
“Don’t you think that this one will just do?”
And your father’s disapproving in the kitchen,
“You don’t need no occult nonsense,
Or a system to order out your brain”
He just stands there “focussed”
Over a pot on a blue/green flame,
Subconsciously mumbling while stooped,
“Look here Son, look, I’m making poa-tery soup.”
But you would never tell him that,
Just like you’ll never be finished, ever.
No-one ever is
Even if they know they’re doing it or not.
My grandfather died last week,
The sourest stuck-in-a-rut-of-a-man
That you’re ever going to meet.
The diagnosing doctors were in for a treat.
They said that there was something wrong there,
Something wrong with his brain,
That there was something strange there
Fundamentally, main.
They said that he died - after scans - in a cubicle stall,
When his brain haemorrhaged and cracked open,
And jigsaw pieces piled up against the wall.
Copyright © Chris Mccartney | Year Posted 2005
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