dash
Yesterday’s Potatoes
 
A Victorian block, its glowing terracotta
heated with ideas that cooled to chalk at the blackboard.
The arrival of sealed metal cauldrons, bubbling from a toil
over knobbled grey mash and skin-puckered yellow custard.
 
So it was for me in my hour, now past. I am colder,
a mental cauldron in an anorak zipped into a scrunch.
My daily walk of repeating landscapes is cutting
beyond the brittle curl of peeling black railings
pricked by pollution-sucking green bushes.
 
Today’s young mouths swallow a different menu
as they taste a life beside the corridors of their power.
Out through the gates they push past me,
I am left behind, locked into my wandering thoughts.
Nothing to be said by words always missing their mark
using language shredded old by breezes like sandpaper.
 
Inside in the queue for the self-checkouts,
I forget what I am and joke with two schoolboys.
Their faces are puzzled at my well-pressed irony.
It’s too bitter for their tongues, sugared with TikTok
and poked across the modern playground.
 
Without an app to wiggle, I turn away,
a recycled carrier bag in each winter-gloved hand.
Irrelevance on a trip to the supermarket.
It looks like me.


Susan Wilson
 

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Susan Wilson would be pleased to hear them

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