End of the Party

I

You walk into the smart Holland Park apartment
And immediately feel something slippery under your feet.
On the triangular kitchen table is a multicoloured forest
Of half-spilled liquor bottles.
You find a band in the living room
Drumming bongos without gusto whilst girls,
Delicious as bonbons,
Dance shoeless.
A shapeless mass gathers beneath their painted toes,
A spillage from the garden that you diagnose
As foam,
Ejaculated from a canon-sized Champagne bottle,
Plugged at the back with a garden hose.
And you enter what was once a promising garden
That has now filled up with artificial snow.

II

The party apparatchiks are mostly men,
Semi naked, native islanders,
Pissed to the point of no return.
The soil beneath has metamorphosed them into giant slugs
Which is presumably why they enjoy rubbing up against one another so much.
One man picks up the only girl in their midst.
 ‘Put me down! Put me down! You’re supposed to be in government!’
He lets go.
She sinks down into the snow.
As the rest of the men-boys pile up on top of her
In the kind of organised chaos they have enjoyed
On a regular basis since sixth form.
One of them casually observes
 ‘You could drown in all this foam’
Before diving head first into a shrub.
The girl re-emerges,
Wet from toe to head,
With blades of grass licking her slick shoulders.
‘Next time’
She says spitting bubbles of soap,
‘I’m voting for the Tories’.

Hassan Abdulrazzak

If you've any comments on this poem, Hassan Abdulrazzak would be pleased to hear from you.

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