Waiting For The Weekend In The Workaday Waterworld Poem by C Richard Miles

Thursdays, temptingly, thrum with expectations in mosaics
In the torpid, turbid terrain of muddy, miserable marsh
Masquerading as our world-weary, working week.
Toil’s tiredness tries and threatens to obliterate our outlook
But, like a curious carp, hope holds up her head high,
Inquisitively above the crushing, quashing quagmire
Of tepid tedium, trying to drag us down like quicksand,
Her eager eyes earnestly flickering like licking flames
For those elusive, ephemeral mayflies,
Precursors of the spree of the weekend
But we and they are not yet hatched.

Still, soon, silently, they will struggle up to the surface,
Ready to emerge through the liquid lash of lush licence
Seducing us from our tedium to the tempting turpitude
Of drunkenness. Now we whisper, wishfully, wistfully:
Tomorrow we fly free. Tomorrow is Friday, fry day
When we flatfish-fry transiently transmute into flying-fish
Acquiring a hundred hues, spreading uncertain, wavering wings,
Wet with work, to escape the morass of mundanity
When we will wake and thrust ourselves
Into quivering, noctilucent air, nightlife.
Now, we and they are not yet hatched.

Till then, dismally, we remain dormant, dream-dozing
In the sludgy swamp of stultifying drudgery
Covering, like cold discontent, the sad, soiled city.
Paperwork presses down, drowning like soggy sphagnum
Soaking up the oxygen from wasted waters of enjoyment
And, with aching acidifying action aims to asphyxiate desire
But, still sleeping, fresh spawn of freedom fosters fantasies
And, when the time is ripe, will rip binding bonds
Of enslaving employment, and swim swift
To the liberating lake of life-restoring leisure.
Still, we and they are not yet hatched.

Now night, nervously, sleep’s soporific struggle
Mutters a mumbling metamorphosis in the murky mire.
Emerging, elegantly from the sedge at the slough’s edge
Sloughing off scant, spent skin, crawl caddisfly
To the roofscape of reeds, ready for take-off.
Set in sheer sky, shining temptations of tomorrow
Wait to lure us, brazenly to their banquet.
But like coy Koi, we keep communion
With repose, regenerating for the morrow
And morning in the meaningless mere of humdrum.
And we, not they are not yet hatched.

Dull dawn, depressingly, suffuses through soft stillness,
Antepast of the agony of boredom’s bullrush bog
Tendering a tenuous hold on us with its tenebrae
Of toilsome tasks. Dullness dangles in Damocleian destiny
But, bright, in a sapphire sky, fly damselflies of pleasure
Tantalising temptresses of early evening and expected end
Of occupation’s overextension. When, when? We whisper
As, hopeful, hesitant hatchlings, we shimmer in the swamp,
Clamouring to catch our first flavours
Of Friday’s fleeting feasts and festivities
But we, not they are not yet hatched.

Work winds, drearily, like wiry, tangling tendrils of bladderwort
Grasping our breath, sapping all sapient sensation.
Flittering fitfully above the foetid fen, swamped with scum
Of lassitude with work, midges and mosquitoes mass
To tease our aspirations, apparitions of partying play
Poised perilously close within our outstretched reach.
Burdens bear down but some bravely burst upwards
As lunchtime’s libations promise confinement’s end,
Early hatchlings gasping for fresh air
Tasting insect tanginess of idleness.
Still we, not they, are but half hatched.

Toil ends, thankfully, like those lingering late larvae
Still to escape their shells, we, the fingerling fry, labour
Languishing in the stagnant soup of the palling, peaty pool
No longer. Dazzled by dipping psychedelic dragonflies
Of possibility that our pubs and pleasuredomes provide,
We leap, violently swallowing in gulps of alien atmosphere,
Gnashing at that gnat, the anonymous anopheles of clubland,
Which may still sting sharply come Saturday
In the blurry buzz of heady hangovers,
We thrash in freedom’s feeding frenzy.
As we and they are here, whole hatched.