Two old men, doing nothing in the day
sit ill at ease but side by side
in a bus-stop shelter.
One leans back in shadow, attending time and light.
The other pushes at the lateness of their bus,
complaining but unsurprised at another's failings,
"What's that bloody driver doing now?"
An advertisement above them shows
fluent, pretty motherhood, suggesting tea.
They show leathery fore-arms in short-sleeved shirts.
They leave it to their scarred and pitted skins
to speak of flame and acid and whipping steel.
These men worked the post-war decades on factory floors
while nuclear armageddon yawned beneath them –
yawned, then slackly gaped to find it wasn't there.
If they can't rest, who can?
Conversations with blokes like them can be torrid.
Give either one a teacup.
His pinky juts out angrily as he expounds,
"This business of the dole! Hell!
There was none of that when I was young.
We worked or starved, and so should you;"
and he glares about, his bristly eyeballs rasping the face
of anyone who hasn't hastily agreed.