Waiting for my girlfriend to blow-dry her hair,
I pick up a book of poetry in her parents’ living room.
It is yellowed, a sign of either affection or neglect,
but not worn, fingered through with dog ears and tears,
although a picture will not wear from having eyes laid upon it.

The poems are slow, spoken in the tongue of maturity
where the pace is deliberate, a trawl, a meander of thoughts
and observations: not Proustian, but perhaps of so much
unnecessary detail, it would be hard for the casual reader
to differentiate between the garnish and the meat.

I place a few joints onto my tongue and roll them around
to try out the taste, sampling mustang flavours,
old world spices presented in archaic vernaculars,
lines soaked in gin, pickled in barrels of rum,
a lifetime’s inebriation affecting interpretation.

It is affectation, the cloak of the poet’s world
or the written truth, distilled through age and experience?
In my young mouth, the verse failed to spark,
that promised fire snuff out with the snap of closed pages
and I coughed out the cold whispers of shallow smoke.

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