Koumpounophobia

I’ve always hated buttons.

Fiddly fumbly four-eyed flat-faced

cunts

goggling gormlessly

offending my digestive system

off otherwise majestic

military jackets. No, give me a zip any day,

a zip you can flick up and down by a microphone

and sample its wavy and sibilant sounds

onto some electrofunk folk punk

with panpipes, balalaika, glockenspiel

and twelve-inch ruler

twanged off the edge of a chair,

you can’t do that with buttons.

 

Aged thirty,

I shared a thermostat with Stella,

a seamstress who sat by her sewing machine

all morning. In her bedroom

lay boxes and buckets and bowls full of buttons

that glittered and glinted and

dribbled their vomit-provoking

vapid glory. On the wall outside her room,

a button the size of a dinner-plate

glared its purple putridness.

“You’re a real koumpounophile,” I told her.

 

                             A moth

             fluttered around the asparagus plant.

 

                                     “That means you like buttons.”

She replied, “Oh, I see.

I thought you said I was a paedophile.”

 

Eight years later, strolling round

a lake in Poland,

Lake Stretchyourneck or something,

Shchetchanek? Stcheshanek? Whatever.

Past a huge coconut made of old deckchairs and drawers

on a stage, and a metal

star on a stick, there it stood.

A button the size of a bus shelter.

 

Fuck off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Alfie Shoyger