apart from 8

thighs tight, ankles like cricket’s legs, shoes as thin as needles,
hair blonde, cornfield blonde at late summer sunset,
and roots night black
– sat at a table to my right -
resting her elbow on the velvet cushioned red,
as she told a story to her mates,
one on his mobile, of this guy in
New York who met this
hot bird – like, well, I mean hot – and got
syphilis - yeah, really - and she
laughed, her face youthful and perfect. Later,
one of the guys murmured something
and she fell lush
on the velvet and she laughed a stony, harsh, endless
rattle of unmirth. Shortly they left -
she riding her bum out of there. I
sipped my tea and read some more of Conscious Love,
apparently so much better than the unconscious sort,
whatever that is,
by two ‘Froodo-Jungians’, who of course, like so much of
born-again Utopia, had found the light
and needed to 'best-seller' it to you. And I
read of all the 'traps' – from trap 1 to trap 9 –
as I worked through,
fork-slice by fork-slice, the cheesecake, glistening
like a vanilla and cranberry Cheshire cat.
Trap-full, trap-shut,
I closed the book, and before me
were still a couple, their ex-beauty further tinged
by an endlessly-tried debate
and merely drooped now in a look of subtle scorn.
At my gaze she glanced, with something
somewhere between
‘fuck you’ and ‘I wonder’
or maybe she was just thinking of the … of the 'and'-ful days.
And between them, in another parallel plane,
a boy
who intoned and muttered by stages,
unnoticed, unrecognised, irrelevant -
like his yellow coat on the floor.
I opened the book
and flicked thru’ the traps.
Yep, I reckoned, I’m ensnared in all of them,
‘xcept perhaps for no. 8.