Surly.
Bono looks surly.
Putting him beside a book called ‘Euphoria’
did it.
Bono feels anything but.
Euphoric, that is.
He’s been languishing on the Express Shelf
for three weeks
while books all around him have been flying
off the shelf.
‘Pissed’ is closer to the mark
as in ‘Pissed off’.
Bono is not used to this sort of treatment.
I would take him home myself
but I already have.
If the book was as lean and finely crafted
as a U2 song
it’d be different.
But it is as bloated as a Pynchon novel.
Can’t keep Bono in the car for too much longer.
It’s a warm day, getting warmer.
I can’t let Bono get overheated, not on my watch.
He was good enough to come with me,
make himself available.
It’s my fault.
I should have gone to the library AFTER
I had done my grocery shopping
but I was excited. The book had just come in.
What if someone nicked it?
After all, the book is in high demand.
53 requests for it when I put my name down
and only 5 copies.
Bono would have been proud.
And I want to get home quickly and start getting into it,
before the heat starts curling the pages,
and Bono starts sweating.
I’ve seen him live, the sweat oozing out of him.
It’s a bloat of a book at 563 pages.
I hope he’s good at prose writing as he is
in writing songs.
But first there’s these veggies to get.
Hang on, Bono. Won’t keep you waiting long
*pic courtesy of pinterest
She wants to hear some of my poems.
You don’t get asked that too often.
So I choose the bright ones, the buoyant ones,
the ones with a lot of bounce.
She loves ‘The Wrong Saint’
the one about getting lost on our way back from the winery
and praying to St. Francis, instead of St. Christopher,
the patron saint of travellers.
No wonder we were getting lost.
We were praying to the wrong guy.
She loves Quilton too, that one I posted,
an early Covid poem,, Quilton Loves Your Bum’
with all its jackanapery.
I used to read to her as a child,
little stories I made up,
and now I’m reading to her again,
my little story poems,
at the age of 18.
my grand-daughter, Grace.
And she still loves what I write.
Can I stop now, I ask,
a little exhausted.
It’s good to have a fan.
She wasn’t really a bum.
She had a name.
Lauren.
She had a face too
but she asked me not to
photograph it.
But what really attracted her to me
was she was reading a book.
You don’t really associate street people
with reading.
And it was a big book.
Like a Russian novel.
Dostoevsky or Tolstoy maybe.
But it was a home grown novelist.
Bryce Courtenay
a true story about a girl called Jessica.
She was on page 237 and she was only halfway
into it.
We talked briefly.
I put some coins in her cap and left her to it
on the cold sidewalk.
I would like to have known her story
but you can’t be intrusive.
I am going to bed with Mrs. Crasthorpe.
I have been to bed with her before.
It was a most pleasant experience.
Her husband is dead. She is a free woman now.
She is fit and feisty and when she’s breathed in the briny air of Eastbourne, she loosens up and tells me.
She has generously full lips. blonde hair and grey-blue eyes and is the ripe old age of 59.
Nothing unseemly passes between us, however.
Sadly she is an invention of William Trevor.
When I was a kid
we always started with Jumping Jacks
on Guy Fawkes night.
We would light the fuses and run.
They had short attention spans.
We didn’t know where
they’d end up.
They had so much energy.
My kids were like that too.
They took after me.
You have ants in your pants, mum used to say
It’s the
Jumping jack gene.
I’d answer.
My niece, also afflicted,
takes medication and has only just read
her first novel at fifteen.
‘Adam Bede’
[ does anyone still read this?]
The dogs have it too.
Even in their sleep they are running.
Perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage
to being jittery
No, I’m not buying new slippers just yet.
And no, I’m not getting my dressing gown out.
Nor my pyjamas.
Boxers will do.
And my cozy murder mysteries can snuggle against each other
on the bookshelf for another month.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sherlock Holmes.
I’m riding Autumn out till Winter arrives.
I am sitting down reading to the drone of bees.
A copy of the TLS lies open on my knees.
We must get a frizzle on, my partner exclaims
Apropos of nothing then goes off again
To attend the roast, while I attend to the Times.
There’s a lost poem by Hardy which clumsily rhymes.
A frizzle or two? Whatever can she mean?
I scratch my head then read once again.
I take another sip of my beloved cab sav
While she takes a pee in the outdoor lav.
As soon as I began reading it, ‘The Ice Cream Palace,’ I began to have dairy dreams.
Don’t you know it is forbidden, I said. I banished you from my diet years ago.
But the dream pulled up to me like a Mr. Whippy van chiming.
What could I do?
I settled back into my vanilla-and–pistachio armchair and read Gianni Rodari’s deliciously delightful tale.
My eyes greedily licked every sentence.
I scooped the words up with pleasure.
They melted in my mouth.
The residue ran down my chin in rainbow rivulets.
John Malone 