It was a festive thirty degrees in the midday heat of the first ‘summer’ day in spring and I headed down to the Phillip street bookshop. It was nearly 2pm but Martin place was still busy, office workers were seated on the orange and yellow outdoor chairs that had been placed across the wide steps of the sloping mall: having lunch, talking, reading, people-watching and monologuing or index-finger-texting-while-chewing into smart phones. I walked towards my not-so-usual lunch spot, the MLC food court and had a momentary flash of excitement from the potential culinary plenitude on offer.
Just outside the food court opening, a man wearing a small straw hat was seated on a foldable chair with a typewriter in his lap. He had a whiteboard propped up against the foot of the chair- “Poems while you wait.”
I thought about my anticipation regarding lunch (I had already decided that if nothing new took my fancy, I would head to Burger Project and get my occasional Americano con doble queso) and experienced a pang of guilt… or altruism or fancy or I’m-not-sure-what. Six paces earlier I had passed the regular Martin Place mooch with the the suitcase-pooch without any perceptible change in affect.
A solitary meal served up in disposable packaging and eaten with plastic utensils, no matter how delicious or bland, calorie-rich or -constrained, on a glorious day or a gloomy one, will cost $20 (thereabouts, con o sin fritas y cola).
If I tallied all the words I write for work (discounting the ⌘C&V characters which form the large majority) – what would they cost? Could I write a short ditty while someone watched on, cheeks full of Pad Thai? A lunchtime limerick with an economy of ideas to match the 3-for-2 sushi roll special? What were my expectations entering into the extra-ordinary occurrence of lunch at this particular food court? They all feature the same fare: a rotisserie, an all-purpose Continental-style cafe, a burger joint, a Chinese take-away, a nori-roll stand, a kebab shop etc.
“Write me an ode to familiarity.”
“A what?”
“Uh… an ode. An ode to familiarity. Please. Um… I’m going to get some lunch, I’ll be back.”
On my way in, I observed the Martin Place Mooch pack-up his suitcase Pooch and cardboard sign, he poured what charitable contributions he received into his pocket and headed eastward towards Parliament House. I bought an uninteresting vegetarian wrap at the stand closest to the entry and sat on a chair near the poet, who paused thinking from time-to-time while typing out my lyric order. The sky had turned dark and the wind frustrated the street cleaner as he grasped at the leftover flotsam of lunch hour, empty wrappers and soiled serviettes evading the grasp of his garbage-grabber on increasingly gusty puffs of dust. I chewed nonchalantly on the tasteless wrap without looking at the typist but as soon as I heard the click of the margin-release followed by the whoosh of paper getting pulled out of the rollers, I got up. He found a pen from his trouser pocket and signed it, shaking the paper to dry the ink as he handed it to me. I read it there and then. Without any appraisal and a brief “Thanks.”, I gave him a $10 note, put the poem into a book and walked back to my office.
I re-read the poem and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like it. I find it rather twee and have since become suspicious that the contents may be a template for every other poem that’s served up at lunch time. I mean, it really is an ode to frienship (sic).
I have since stuck it on a pinboard at home and penned an ode myself, which I think (unsurprisingly) is much better. I have also come to the conclusion that it would be a horrible job to write on-demand without the copy, paste and autocorrect functions of a word processor.
Familiaris – of the same family, you and I us homo sapiens
always seeking novelty: NEW RESULTS –
mundanus non mundialis
ipso facto
locus pocus quotidianus
ibideum, idem but not
all the time and in unequal measure. Therefore, it
really
is a pleasure and such
treasure that
You can find, in this easy acrostic, an ode to the aforementioned.