Poetry

Joey

My aunt discovered condensed milk

could  stick hearth tiles better than Superglu.

The year grown men would take a van

and garden forks to dig turnips by moonlight.

We got our shoes from a box

paired up and tied at the soup kitchen

and Fred Taylor walked home in two odd shoes.

You no longer saw drinkers at the club,

their gold ingot packs of Benson’s on the table,

laughing with their coal dust eye-liner.

Her blue budgie learnt to repeat the word

scab, scab, scab.

The green one said nothing.

Karl Riordan

© 2014