It was the day of my flu jab

20212 on the dot next to the sea

 

Would I like a pneumonia vaccine

Yes

What are the side effects

Irritability and fussiness

I would not notice these/neither would you

Book it in a few days/or come back next week

 

For the rest of the day

People bumped into me

Blind incompetent people

Hit my aching arm

On this day of all days

Today I hated the world

After loving it yesterday

 

I purchased a slim volume

Of Paul Verlaine’s poetry

It was published by the

Peter Pauper Press in 1961

The book had an attractive dust jacket

An erratic candy stripe

Pink White and Green

 

I imagined it in a Hitchcock film

Being read with menace

By the bad guy

Supremely intelligent

And a master of languages

But a psychopath all the same

 

A beautiful Boucher model she 

But without powder in her hair 

Gloriously blond her witching air 

Tempts all men to debauchery 

 

I looked at the Saturday shoppers

The bland Saturday shoppers

The bleak Saturday shoppers

But Kim Novak was nowhere to be seen

 

The artist who I admired once said

Trop verte et mal éclairée

Yet I disagreed with him

As I loved the white coastal light

I thought it to be the equivalent of Venice

 

I am about an hour away

From my Strawberry Dreams

Sometimes they are vacant

And at other times full

I think I shall dream

Of being a courtier tonight

 

I will not watch the journey of the moon

As I normally do and will blame

The high level low clouds

 

My arm will not ache tomorrow as it does not really ache now

I have always preferred an imagined pain to the real thing

This will help my waking mood as I stroll along the promenade

Towards the deckchairs red blue white and green

 

8th October 2022