LOOKING FOR A SIGN
This morning the ground is damp, and the birds are singing unhurried songs. The air is fresh and floral; a light mixture of flowers and grass.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a stuffed animal in the air, and indeed it is. It is a blurred Ronnie jumping for joy by a bridge in Port Sunlight. My eyes were a little blurry when taking the photo and I didn’t really realise that he was quite so out of focus until I checked the photos later on! (Note to self... don’t catch up with reading things on the phone during car journeys when your wife is driving without putting the reading glasses on because it makes your eyes feel strained, tired and a wee bit blurry.)
There was a partial eclipse this week, which was marked by brother and sister colanders, jacket potatoes, a dragonfly fly-by, bat swoops and shooting stars. That’s a lovely kind of eclipse evening.
And this weekend I was feeling excited at the thought of being back in the place where a poem was first sparked into being. The poem in question was inspired by a sign on a vending machine in the toilets at a poetry reading I went to in October 2024 at Port Sunlight, and this weekend saw us heading in exactly that direction for a yarn show.
This poem was also the one that I casually read out loud at a yarn show last weekend. The one that had me setting down the response it received because it made my heart sing. So before we headed off with all the yarny goods I packed a copy of the poem into my bag. I was ready to take a photo of it next to the vending machine in the toilets. I also decided it might be pretty cool to record it whilst I was there since I would be ‘on location’.
And the moral of the story is… don’t wait.
We unpacked the knitwear and then headed straight over to The Bridge Inn, where the poem began, to ask about visiting their toilets. We had a wonderfully warm and friendly greeting when we entered, and this made it super easy to strike up a conversation about poems and toilets! I was invited to explore the corridors and see if things were as I remembered. And, despite me thinking I had originally gone upstairs, there on the ground floor was the exact toilet door sign that was etched on my memory. But when I went inside, the sign on the vending machine was rather less poetically inspirational than it had been back then. It no longer read: “Have the best sex you’ve ever had”, instead there was just a simple brand label in its place.
Perhaps someone reading this will have been at that poetry reading and remember the vending machine and the sign it used to wear. Perhaps during the sign’s time there it made other people momentarily pause. Perhaps I am the only person to have written a poem about it. And maybe the moral of the story is actually that there is a joy in setting down a moment in time, and that it is the moments that matter. Who’d have thought a visit to one toilet in 2024 could have sparked all these thoughts so many months later. Oh, and I loved the poetry readings I heard that evening too so if you were one of the readers there, I tip my hat to you and your setting down of words.
Here’s my poem with huge thanks to Damien B. Donnelly for giving this poem its home in The Storms Issue V, and to all those who take time with the words...
HAVE THE BEST SEX YOU’VE EVER HAD
That’s what it says
on a vending machine in the toilets
in a pub with kaleidoscope carpets.
I feel momentarily guilty for being tired lately,
for not doing the things we did when we first met.
Someone comes in
so I move to the hand dryer
and resist the temptation to ask them
what they think about this invitation.
I picture us two, decades ago in our rented flat.
What we did back then was pretty spectacular
and it’s rather nice to think there’s going to be more.
I won’t tell you I got my inspiration from a sign
in The Ladies.
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