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John West

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Two Hundred and Twenty Five Dollars

For paint and one day’s painting, the best of both, Bill swears
to preserve the sills and doors, the gutters and downpipes
brushes and ladders supplied, water and coffee from me
but it’s the amount that trips me, oh, it’s fair and anyway
I’m allergic to lawn mowing, gardening and daubing
I sit inside and write or read or watch sub-titled films
I’ve recorded or I lie on the couch and doze, no
I paid precisely that for a gun when I first lived with Pat, cramped in
I would burst out each weekend and drive into the bush
to blast beer bottles to dust, beer cans to hell
to blow apart tree stumps and trees: you can close your eyes
and wake up twenty years later and the world has changed
you would have destroyed what you now stop to look at
to sniff, to photograph or to climb
you range around a lounge room, contented
snoozing when you want to, reading when
                                                                   there is something to read
you could even become a Catholic after enduring half your life
not believing in anything further than football.

 

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