The Night Before the Morning After
By Bernard Pearson
Having spent all they had on a ticket
For the big game
Helplessly sober, Welshmen
Cling to each other for comfort
It is Saturday night on match day
And anything could happen!
Girls are on the loose dressed to kill
And shooting from the lips.
Shoe horned through the exits
By boys with up and over chests
The size of double garage doors
Whose slow eyes have seen it all before.
Human popcorn cracks and spits
Across the city streets to be consumed
In clublands wee small hours of desperate fun.
While in pubs that smell of pee and something
Happily you just can’t place,
Amid a recipe succulent with drizzled aggression
And seasoned by a pinch of slap and tackle
We stand sing and sway in numbed communion
As across the room, reflected
In a brass dimpled bar,
Distorted heads nod ascent
To who knows what.
All conversation spent by
The incessant throb
Of the juke box.
Minor hits from
Someone else’s past.
Meanwhile in an outer room
Cigarette smoke is drawn
Into the lungs of middle aged men
From broken homes
When mercifully and not before time
The landlord calls last orders
On a night to forget.
Bernard Pearson: His work appears in many publications, including Aesthetica Magazine, The Edinburgh Review and Crossways. In 2017 a selection of his poetry “In Free Fall” was published by Leaf by Leaf Press. In 2019 he won second prize in The Aurora Prize for Writing for his poem “Manor Farm.”