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Peter Robinson

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The Bargain

Once, in a junk shop along the Albert Road,
amongst old soldiers’ medals, uniforms,
the perished gas masks, heaped-up furniture
from clearances, defunct family hoards
of pottery, paperbacks, some stuffed birds
or records no one wanted any more -
I stumbled on a few job lots of words.

Naturally enough, they’d seen better days
and smelt quite high, but you never can tell
when a word will come in handy...Well,
although the chap there said he’d no idea
where the stuff came from (filling in for someone),
as he told me I could have them for a song
I knocked him down a bit and took them home.

Curious to see what I’d bought, needless to say,
I tipped my plastic bag out on the table
and there, disarmed, inert, inarticulate, they lay:
province, bungalow, pale, slogan, char, veranda,
abacus, divan, dosh, audit, serf, indenture,
annihilate, cancel, snuff, silence, disappear,
not to mention ones like station, race or gender.

Why not clean them up, they’ll be as good as new?
Then I borrowed Brasso, silver polish, perfume;
yet no amount of elbow grease or corporation pop
would cut through centuries of use and blame.
So I took them back along the Albert Road,
but the man had gone, the owner didn’t want them,
and no one else either, though I tried every shop -

‘Sorry, mate,’ they said, ‘we’ve already got the same.’

 

Page(s) 37-38

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