Poem
John McCullough
THE BARMAN\'S FANTASY
THE BARMAN\'S FANTASY
THE BARMAN\'S FANTASY
4 am and the big mouths are scrappingwith spluttered innuendoes.
My best reply’s deadpan: a thrust scoop,
the rattle of ice in the bucket –
scant relief for tongues made sour
by thoughts of desolate flats.
But the black tranny with her constellation
of diamante hasn’t finished,
stares into a Carling’s brassy depths
and finds, she announces, two ghosts
both rent, in fifties leather, jerking off
to the bleeps of the fruit machine.
All gas. She’s no more psychic
than sober but, locking up, it’s a vision
I can’t escape when on the nudge buttons
there’s a glimmer from something
that’s not quite soap, that can’t be
but for one long second is,
the two of them achingly real,
lording it up as they cuddle,
slower now, through stale smoke
and airborne specks of crisps
while I turn the key
and quietly enter moonlight.
© 2008, John McCullough
From: the lives of ghosts
Publisher: tall-lighthouse, London
From: the lives of ghosts
Publisher: tall-lighthouse, London
John McCullough
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1978)
John McCullough was born in Watford in 1978 and grew up there during the eighties and nineties. He studied English and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia before completing an MA in Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex, followed by a PhD on Shakespeare and friendship. He still teaches creative writing there now, in addition to similar work at the Open University. His ...
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Poems of John McCullough
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THE BARMAN\'S FANTASY
4 am and the big mouths are scrappingwith spluttered innuendoes.
My best reply’s deadpan: a thrust scoop,
the rattle of ice in the bucket –
scant relief for tongues made sour
by thoughts of desolate flats.
But the black tranny with her constellation
of diamante hasn’t finished,
stares into a Carling’s brassy depths
and finds, she announces, two ghosts
both rent, in fifties leather, jerking off
to the bleeps of the fruit machine.
All gas. She’s no more psychic
than sober but, locking up, it’s a vision
I can’t escape when on the nudge buttons
there’s a glimmer from something
that’s not quite soap, that can’t be
but for one long second is,
the two of them achingly real,
lording it up as they cuddle,
slower now, through stale smoke
and airborne specks of crisps
while I turn the key
and quietly enter moonlight.
From: the lives of ghosts
THE BARMAN\'S FANTASY
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