Entries
6th November 2010
By Michael Egan | 2010 November 06
someone is stubbing cigarettes out
in the landlord’s potted geraniums tipping
one of the twenty rums into his rose bushes
the alcohol drips out and coats petals like dew
and the roots are as drunk as the three
leftover hippies who are talking
about a stone circle in the lake district
where one of them woke to hovering
orbs of lights went down to the village
shop to get bacon and that
where they told him how everyone in the village
had seen the same orbs even the children
and as he tells this story he taps
the ash from his cigarette over a lonely
cactus whose spikes do no good
against the burn of a loosened lump
of smouldering tobacco if the place
had laws by rights he’d be taken into
the toilet now and have his nose shoved
up against the graffiti there those dirty
marked words are the landlord’s second
pet hat he told us on a similar
night when the rain lashed the corrugated
roof of the yard that if he ever caught
someone marking his white tiled
walls the ones he says he scrubs every day
then he’d smash their noses and see
what that red ink writes see if their
phone numbers bleed from their broken
noses or if their claims for good times
run from their fractured skulls
but here the landlord is watching the hippies
and the walls of the toilet are never clean
and the plants in the yard are never watered
their buds dead their leaves brown and falling.