“A constant reminder…”
“Two days before I left for Scandinavia…."
“Then he went off the dole…"
“As a pretext for doing that... bullshit…”
I'm just going to write down snippets of what I hear people say
Beside me and adjacent in the Mullumbimby cafe
I'm all set up with my long black ice coffee
Cream on the side
And hear that!
It's Billy Joel singing
She's Always A Woman
How nostalgic
I was sixteen when that came out
Probably sipping ice coffee much the same
In a basement cafe called Comos
Next to the station in Hiroo
I was just learning
About women myself
They were teaching me, first hand
The girls from Sacred Heart just up the road
They would fraternise with a bunch of us guys
The ones who rode their bikes 45 mins from our school
I always stayed the latest 3:45 to 5:30
Cause I lived not far from there
We'd all smoke cheap Japanese cigarettes
(Seven Star, HiLite, Golden Bat)
And laugh, joke, laugh, smoke
Just from listening to their banter, gossip and chat
So much was gleaned
It was an education
Much more valuable than that by the one that was ostensible
At my school that was international
But way too ambitious and assertive for me
I was a poet
Even then
A gentle souled, Aussie, comic kid grown up in the bush
On the hunt for fun and friendship, games and laughter
(And of course I made a point to find it -
Tenacious in the pursuit of insouciance
Keen to drift, playfully meander)
What would I ever need from physics, history or chemistry?
I knew it was all a time waste (for me)
Instead I would draw pictures with my multi-coloured biro
Make comics
Compose whimsical, ironic poetry
Now here I am forty years later
Doing pretty much the same thing
I learnt plenty more lessons from women over that time
Upfront and personal
From being completely in love
To emotionally torn and tortured
Incredulous, blissful and in total awe
The entire spectrum
Had heaps of fun, shed a few tears
Yeah, I had a good run
Married once
Some cheeky one nighters
Some live-togethers
That were real gems, true treasures
Year long international romances
Swedish, American, Kiwi, Korean
All of them delightfully complex, mesmerisingly feminine
We went deep
Got entangled
And, as always happens
After they burnt bright
They ended
So now I salvage the throw-away phrases of random strangers
Up the back of a tiny town cafe
And write about it
As I loosely reminisce and contemplate
All the everythings and nothings
That have come my way
And you know what
It's all OK
It's all OK
You just take it as comes
And eventually you find your way
Back to where you began
A series of alternating
Everythings and nothings
Living life is half the fun
(The other half is just getting it done)
Everythings and nothings
Once, twice, a thousand times
All over again
All over again
Everythings and nothings
All over again
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