The other day I switched on my old faulty laptop looking for two poems I remember writing but couldn’t find anywhere. I didn’t find either of them, but I did find this one, which I don’t remember writing, though I can make a fair guess at which cafe is referred to in it.
It will be a happy day when I can return there. And I now have a nice new lightweight, fully functioning laptop (not so new – I’ve had it for a year, but not had much opportunity to take it out in that time).
The Invisible Woman
I am invisible.
I creep into the cafe and hide in the corner
scoping out the tables near the wall sockets.
Because my laptop powerpack is buggered
since I knocked my coffee over it
and I have to remember which keys don’t work.The upper shift and return are the worst,
I always forget about them.
But otherwise it works okay,
just a bit slow at times,
like me
for the same reasons:
too much coffee and getting old.The words that churn around my head
don’t always make it down my arms
and out through my fingers.
Who cares? I’m sure
they’re no great loss to literature.
And when I settle down in here and open up
what then?
What comes will come.
If you never start, you never reach the place
where the journey settles into rhythm.
You never catch the flow.
but it’s so much easier,
not to start.So I come here,
and leave the house, the cats,
the dirty pots, the dusty furniture, the grubby floors,
escape them all, evade responsibility.
Displacement, of myself and of my thoughts.
Here I will coax the words out.
Any words will do,
the words I lost, the words I chased
to the bottom of a cup of coffee
and then what?I probably should order another
Linda Rushby, Wednesday, 13 September 2017
but who cares, when I’m invisible?
Southsea Storytellers 