[Matt Q]

We were talking about Michael's latest
poem and how he needed to loosen up
a little with his line-breaks and perhaps
even consider subverting the whole idea
of what a poem was, when Mark said
he'd consumed more than enough coffee
poetry and called over to order his third latte
from the waitress who looked a little like
the woman from that soap opera
from the seventies that neither of us
could quite remember -- except she had
lank hair, and slightly dead eyes,
like a fish. You wouldn't find hair like that
in a soap opera, Mark said, and fish
surely don't belong in a poem
about coffee. He started back in
on his theory about how every good poem
should end on a conceptual rhyme,
and I started to tell him how my father
had once visited the local docks on a school trip,
and there was a diver there, decked out
in baggy 1950s diving suit and one of those
big metal helmets, who'd played a trick
on all the other kids who watched him
submerge into water that was black
as an Americano, bubbles floating up
like the froth on fresh-poured cappuccino,
and then, after the the longest time,
just as their interest had begun to waver,
he'd surfaced holding up a fish, which,
and this was the joke, was actually a kipper.
But by then Mark had fallen asleep.


[I think I'm probably channelling ultratalk more than Zapruder, but I had fun anyways]

[for non-Brits. A 'kipper' is a smoked fish (typically herring). 'to kip' is to 'to sleep']