Cups: A Prose Poem

Cups

Beside the plastic, one by one, in order of country, are the cups.  There have been more cups ruined emptying the dishwasher. Right now, the quantity of cups keeps increasing, squashed in, at the back of the cupboard. They’re like friends visiting one another. The Guernica cup (Picasso) from Madrid abuts the English Wren from Shrewsbury.  Black as Guinness, an Irish mug with a Dublin shamrock, sits beside a Japanese Noritake. These cups dressed in bright colours have travelled extensively. It’s privileged porcelain!

    There are two cups that are almost identical, one in green stripes, the other purple. The green states, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; and on the purple is scripted, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. A ‘his and hers’ literature collection – owned by one.

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The Lamp: Prose Poem (updated)

The Lamp

       First be a magnificent artist and then you can do whatever, but the art must be first.  

            (Francisco de Goya)

A young father buys a 70s Beetle fender that houses a chrome front light. The man radiates the glow of restoration, but barely has the funds. He posts the finished photograph of his invention for his son. There it sits in its separateness, still, upright, neat in a corner window, balanced on a block, polished, grinded, painted to look so perfect in its skin, its dim lighting. In the darkness of a room, now a renovation, the lamp-fender glows with a dual switch of light. Low beam for warmth, or high and bright as a car might shine on a midnight run. It’s deft, intrinsic work.

    Perhaps in the lateness of night, when all is quiet, the lamp groans into ignition, twists itself away from a boy’s restless dream – grumbles, just a little – to purr toward a great expanse of naked road.

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Poem: Op Shop

Op-Shop

In a quiet suburban street, ladies visit the aisles of secondhand clothes. Hands separate racks, touch other lives that have come before.

    The young girl, sitting on a bus, straightens her blue pleats, and just around the corner, as if time hasn’t passed, wears a black leather jacket with studs. Later, she buttons a pin-tuck shirt for the insurance company, and on her first date, in that long-legged netted look, zips up her high-heeled boots. At the military ball, she awards the dance floor and all that gaze on her in desirous ice taffeta and strappy, silver stilettos.

    You don’t see the girl now, but the garments are laid out. The pleated skirt, the black leather jacket, the pin-tuck shirt, the taffeta ball dress, the stilettos, and tan knee-highs; all racked and marked in the same display, looking out the same window for a new owner, a new life.

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