Time Being.

TIME BEING

   I watched the old soldier down the street
   stop to suck a cigarette
   and shuffle to the letter-box.
   Out. Back.
   It took him half an hour
   lugging damaged lungs
   to cross and re-cross
   the tiny square of lawn,
   wanting a letter from his son.
   Even that pale wafer
   became too heavy.

   After he'd gone,
   it was Welshy over the road.
   Through restless night-shifts, boring days
   he lurched, booze-reddened,
   with navy tats on leg-of-ham arms
   and finally lost a part of his throat.
   He mumbled another year out
   with a neat little gadget
   for windpipe and voice-box:
   Reckon I'm right for the time being.

   Now it's next door and closer still.
   I wake to the cries of black cockatoos
   with you, out the back,
   coughing droplets on the grass
   and night-chilled concrete paths,
   on a brown, felt slipper.
   You light up the first for the day
   while wife and child sleep on.
   I'd like to tell you about it
   but deep in your tarred heart you know.