It's a Sunday afternoon,
and the barmaid hands a beer to a bloke
who's just walked in.
He fingers his moustache with a kind of swagger
which also conceals his soft, red lip
and he leans towards her oddly:
his body is a question mark:
she was his Girl Next Door,
and god he needs a drink.
Stoicly, she gathers his coins,
rings them to the tally of an absent landlord's wealth
and asks,
"You changed your ways yet?"
"Huh?" he says, stunned before the wound.
"Your bad ways.
You had plenty of them.
I known you
a long time."
A television blares the joys of car-horn and duco;
another tells the black jokes of nuclear armageddon.
There's only one juke box, but it's loud;
and mateships go through their motions blearily,
the men propped up against the bar,
self-medicating
and ministering to each other's condition.
Perhaps she's attended to his as best she can.
He leaves, however, lurching through cacophany,
his beer untouched, its bubbles still rising.
A watchful man shies back from him,
others glance up:
who is threat;
who is pariah?
All this emotion has stripped the men naked.
They hastily dress themselves in ironic smiles
as if a fig-leaf could cover loneliness.
But another man is calling for a beer.
She slops out the glass undrunk
while looking after the shambling back.
Her automatic hands fetch out another jar;
the empty door-frame looks at her.
She leans against the tap
and looks at nothingness.
Yellow liquid streams.
A slant of sun lights her muscled forearm
and the crow's foot at one eye.