dawns dawn dawns
by Paul Tanner
do a shiver
wheeze out green clouds
so they hover like a snot halo,
lean against the wall
and:
black goo sucks at your hair?
it dawns on you:
your black walls are not black,
you don’t know what colour they are
under all the black mould
and you hobble down the road
to the phone box, use your last 50p
to ring your landlord
and you get his machine:
I’m on a cruise, he says, until the twenty-fourth of February …
mould is in your lungs and
YOUR LANDLORD IS ON A CRUISE
and you get back to your room
and mould is on the walls and
YOUR LANDLORD IS ON A CRUISE
and there’s a black spider
that be squatting on the black mouldy walls
and she winks
every single eye at you
one by one:
flickering balls of yellow sin
there, like a batch of sick stars
rutting in the corner of cold outer space
because YOUR LANDLORD IS ON A CRUISE
and it’s just you and her now
and one of you needs to eat.
About the author
Tanner has been earning minimum wage, and writing about it, for 15 years now. No, really. His novel ‘Jobseeker’ is on Amazon. He was shortlisted for the Erbacce 2020 Poetry Prize. His latest collection ‘Shop Talk: Poems for Shop Workers’ is published by Penniless Press.
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