‘You drive like a poet,’ his wife said,
and he’s puzzled over it for weeks.
When he drives straight down the highway
is it a run-on sentence, only end-stopped
at the town’s traffic lights? Thinking about it
he pulls into Woolies’ carpark next to
another small Toyota and forms
a rhyming couplet. When he says
‘aubergine’ for ‘eggplant’, she scowls,
so he answers before she can criticise,
‘I simply like the sound of it –
oh-bur-jean. Nice.’ She walks on,
he pushes the wobbly trolley
and tracks left to right like
Ricciardo warming his tyres.
She hisses, ‘What are you doing?!’
And he smiles, ‘I’m a free verse poet,
No curbs here!’ She turns and walks off.