THANKS FOR COMING Poem by Micha Hamel

‘Everybody knows that ugly people have feelings
too the same way that every gorgeous woman
has a person inside as well,' I say at a birthday
to see if someone can be lured from the jungle
of their thoughts to have a nice bout of
eccentric speculation on this kind
of pattern in our persistently fatuous universe.

No word of a lie when I say that six seconds
pass before someone replies: she breathes
in 7, 8 and would I perhaps whisk up some hot milk.

‘Next to my full-time job as middle-class man I have
a life as a person these days,' I then add
in a jocular tone to a receding hairline who
I vaguely recognise from hurried minutes
picking up and taking back my sons. He says:

‘I don't know you but you probably know me
as I work in television.' I say: ‘I would never want
to be rich and famous but would like to be just
rich. Did you know that on the sea floor
there's a cable that connects the continents?'
Then a chatterbox thwarts our conversation:
‘Arnold? Arnold Kecks? The newsreader? What a great -‘

I quickly wade through the swarming infants
to the cake-laden table and come up alongside
a mother luxuriously dolled up who asks how
I manage to cope as an artist while the gift act
hasn't yet been closed off properly in taxation.
No more than nine minutes later my plea for
school uniforms falters as one of those lice mums
interrupts: ‘Ever since I started washing the gym kit
by hand the colours have stopped draining.'

I take a breath and say: ‘Mind you don't take the pants
off hairy-backed gentlemen who willingly stay put in
marriages of convenience. Paint your bedroom a subdued colour
scheme, let the headboard face the window and open the front door,
then all will be fine. Normally speaking we stub out our Havana's
in the strawberries and cream, ride up against the waitresses
and puke bawling with ambivalence into the champagne coolers
to celebrate our idleness. Outside the parade of limousines
stands waiting for the arrival of the all-shattering wrath of
the Lord but until that day the chauffeurs wear their toecaps
away by digging them into the gravel of the drive. And

could you tell that cauliflower in my head that we both
need to be picked up as soon as possible?'