You make your way through your tens
Learning life
You make your way through your twenties
Knowing life
You make your way through your thirties
Questioning life
And then one day,
You are standing next to a table,
At your uncle’s sixtieth birthday party
And on the table is a cake
And it looks like a train
But it is not a train
It is a box-brownie camera
A symbol of my uncle’s love for the device
From his most recent of Aquith.
And as I am scooping up houmous
With a cheese Dorito
My dad walks up beside me
And he says:
“Ere mate, what’s that?”
And he drops something into my hand
I examine the object
And conclude it to be
A bit of nail…or something similar
And my dad tells me
It’s a bit of his tooth
And I give it back to him
A bit disgusted
And then he says:
Shall I put it in the houmous?”
And I laugh and say:“Yeah”
But I don’t really mean it
And he doesn’t do it
And then we both stand there:
Disintegrating at different rates.
copyright 2007
The Unarmed Man |