UBIQUITOUS SNACKS

A preamble kiss and a bottle of cheap chilled
something or other would, he felt sure score
another notch on the bedpost of life. Regardless
he would make his getaway as soon as she fell asleep

Come dawns sweet tea she tutted the crabby tut of the
recycled on behalf of ubiquitous snacks through time and station
‘Bastard…will I ever learn’

Long before commentary wedded animation
she envisaged a synchronized vocalization behind
Pathé’s Animated Gazette’s fluttering silent newsreels
The thing that galled so was that others, better placed
than she had done the self-same thing. Crushed in a
modernistic love, commerce and harmonization compulsion
a transoceanic seaplane getaway a clamorous imperative

A thought struck as she lay unsinkable basking upon
the saline waters of the land locked Sea of Salt, namely
that her current resting place was unique, yet not so she

A little later, dangling bare toes in the Jordan River
sipping Perrier, by the bye musing over this and that
she resolved that a reinvention of self was long overdue

Back in her bare bones hotel charmed upon hearing evenings adhan
prized, new-fangled ‘double twist’ ball point pen upon reverse side of
a snatched rather than chosen postcard, she penned what gnostic poets and philosophers
have quested since the conscious remedy for plagiarism was laid bare
“To be truly unique is to think of words and thoughts
the human collective have missed or not yet discovered”

Dogma and conviction were, she decided the only obstacles in her way
well those and a soupcon of self-belief. Her fatal, never to be remedied flaw
was being unawake to the fact that uniqueness breezes in of its own accord
rather than is unearthed, and as the old wives’ tale goes, ‘Be careful what you wish for’
for there is a merciless price to pay when a daydream prayer begs egocentric invocations

Come a new dawns sweet tea
a broken angel hits the dirt with a dull thump,
an audacious ‘Jazz Age’ concourse shies away
and a ‘Roaring Twenties’ lioness spews out her death rattle roar