This is an expanded version of an earlier poem I think I submitted here
called The Burner. Now it's a sort of companion piece I suppose.
Bill
East Ivanhoe State's Tuckshop lit up our lives.
A drab building adjoining the library when shut,
it sprang to colourful life each recess and lunchtime.
Bright boxes of pink musk sticks; yellow cartons
of flat twelve-inch liquorice straps, a penny a pop,
longitudinally peelable, so six for the price of one.
Chocolate Royals we smashed on our foreheads
before easing off cracked chocolate to reveal
marshmallow- white or pink - on a crisp jam biscuit.
And what about local mash-ups like 'favouries':
rolled-up buttered soft pikelets, two a penny.
Cut sandwiches from home - huh! No competition.
Summer treats were Sunnyboys: sweet orange
cordial in tetrahedral paks, also available frozen,
the better for lasting longer, but forcing choices.
Do you suck out the flavour as the frozen bit melts
knowing you will leave tasteless pale ice at the end
or do you belt your Sunnyboy on a Tuckshop rail,
allowing an even mixture of flavour and ice crunch?
Or for true aficionados: wait, slurp up ice, let it drop
back to pak, slurp some more until all that's left
is impossibly superlative concentrated cold orange.
And then the ripping apart of soggy silver foil;
who had a 'lucky'? The magic printed blue words
'free tetra pak' inside entitled you to suck again.
If you dipped out, and The Burner had already
been raked through, search for unripped paks.
Classrooms were the places for skill acquisition,
gyms and ovals for physical jerks but for sheer
sensuality, it's hard to go past The Tuckshop.
bw
|