Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling Queue. (Revised).

                       

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling`s Queue.


Fragments of the past come to the surface
Just like matchwood splinters
Breaking out through skin.

Recollections tend to be like this:-
Suddenly the stones beneath my feet
Echo to different footsteps
Than those of passing strangers,
I mean, those strangers who happen to be passing
In this lived in moment,
Faces locked on phones.
They are indistinct apparitions, shadow puppets
Merely,
Ghost pale and indecipherable,
Whilst persistent images from my distant past
Hit my eyes with the vehement power of neon.

Your face Jo Jo - in particular - is always on my mind,
More aggravating than my arguments with the Bank.
The fact that we rarely slept together - Jo Jo,
Remains a sore point after all these years.

Suddenly I am back in the Thatcherite nineteen eighties,
You in tow, exploring the derelict South Bank
Searching for that legendary pie and mash shop
Your mother never stopped waffling on about.
(She had lived hereabouts right through the Hitler War
But did not realize how much the world had changed).
To this day I have no idea if that shop was real.

You were chattering away nineteen to the dozen,
That being your custom - Jo Jo -
Never listening but talking for hours and hours on end.
Eventually you moved - on a whim - to San Francisco;
And there has not been a single phone call for twenty years.

GET YOUR TICKETS READY.     STAND IN LINE.
I am shocked back into the turbulent twenty first century
Where certainty is a farce that no one believes in,
And daily life less real than a West End Show.
The queue has shuffled forward onto the steps,
It is a cold wet night to view A Comedy of Errors,
And I have left at home my hat and purple woolly.
You once told me you would not be seen dead in a queue,
But it was de rigueur to be spendthrift and spoiled in the nineteen eighties,
As though the future would be fun filled -  warm and cosy,
A safe place to look back from.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
5th. September 2014. - October 14th. - 15th. 2019.

Sketched while queuing to see The Comedy of Errors. 2014.