Expressing oneself

Pretentious sod.   Why couldn’t he just say ‘We’re finished, I don’t want to see you any more, I don’t think this is working out’ or some such thing?   The usual phrases.  
I know why – because he regards them as ‘terribly clichéd’ and wants to make out he’s a cut above all those sort of people, the ‘vocabulary-challenged’ he says.   Talks as if he’s swallowed a dictionary most of the time, not realising what a prat he sounds – he obviously doesn’t know that his mouth gives that nasty little marble-chewing twist each time, just before he pronounces, pontificates ... comes out with whichever of the six words he set himself to learn the night before.  
Ha!   He thinks I don’t know that, but then he thinks that nice people don’t go scrabbling (Scrabble – that’s another bloody thing!), don’t go scrabbling around in other people’s private drawers and cupboards, don’t read other people’s letters and diaries and notebooks.
Pity he didn’t realise sooner that a) I’m not a nice person and b) I’d got pissed off with him long before he got tired of me.   But I wanted to find out which of the phrases he’d choose to finish it with.   He had a list – a dozen to start with, then he whittled them down and then had a short list of three.   I have to say that telling me I was ‘merely a splash in the river of experience’ wasn’t one of my favourites.   Which is why I kicked him,   Right where it hurts.

West to east and twenty years

Twenty years ago he’d tagged onto

a west coast fresher’s beach week

fancying the fair-haired Emma

Careless immortality and drink and pot

pitch-dark grope into wrong room

into wrong girl,

girl unknown, unnamed and un-protesting

he apologetic
externally enforced hasty exit in the morning

Today east coast Portobello beach,

his yesterday-discovered by coincidence

(she rescued him after drunken fall from wall)

daughter tells him he would benefit from fresh air

before she tells him what he needs to know.

[Another poem for National Poetry Month which is a poetic version of yesterday’s T10 post which will eventually reappear as a short story somewhere, I hope.   The next episode will appear on T10 later today.   I changed the title of this blog, which orginally contained the word recycling because it was attracting some very strange attention!]