Ash Wednesday

The smudge of ash
from a priest’s thumb
marked us.

As we stepped away
from the altar steps,
the forty days to come

a test of our selected abstinence,
giving up sweet things
for the pleasure of denial.

Once it was sugar
to mortify the soul;
decades on, I raise my hand

when tea is offered,
blocking the sweetness
they would impose.

---

My Ugly Launderette

Why is the Japanese girl taking a selfie
with the churning suds as backdrop?

Why do I stare, mesmerised, at the trickle
from the base of the hublot to the dirty floor?

Who is this wild man shouldering a vast sack
and barking good morning to all of us

as he stomps through the narrow space
where we sit on thin benches to examine screens

or start another chapter of The Mill on the Floss
touched by the sisterly love of Maggie for Tom

(the skinny reprobate who tortures toads)
and a sock droops from a split plastic basket

like the watch in a Surrealist painting
with no one stepping forward to claim it?

We have come here to be cleansed, dried,
plucking hot and crumpled sheets at last

from the cavernous mouth of the dryer,
whose cycle we feel has been slyly shortened

by the manager in the pinched recess, revealed
when his shutter rattles slowly upwards

like a painted pierrot when the curtain rises
doffing his cap with a graceful sweep and a smirk.