Changing Sides Poem by Tony Jolley

For no reason I can rightly recall –
Maybe curiosity,
Or just a change of scenery,
Maybe not sleeping so soundly:
Anyway, one of those times
When even your favourite duck-down pillow
Won’t do its duty
And stubbornly refuses
To contour itself to your nape
Or to cosset your aching neck,
Declines even to hold your head
At anything like the right angle
To draw you near to the Land of Nod……
For no good reason like that,
Last night
We swapped our sides of the bed.

I felt as weird as a Thirteen Pound Note:
A country mile from legal tender,
A shilling and sixpence short of shrift.
Suddenly I understood
Cups with left-handed handles,
Why McCartney’s Rickenbacker looks wrong,
How my Dad could play cricket the right way round
Yet swing a six-iron only as a sinister.

Even the heat of your body
Came out of leftfield.
Your breathing sounded strange
In the wrong ear.
My left foot didn’t ‘breathe’ for my body
As efficiently
Stuck out of the duvet
As my right leg,
Now marooned
Deep in deep-heat middle ground.

Changing sides:
I’m a sort of dyspraxic, insomniac Mata Hari…

At least dawn came
And I woke up unshot.