Smoked Fish

So there I was, surrounded by stiff tissues and trying to get to grips with the similarities between 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' when my head was flung around by the sound of a long reverberating squeak at the window. Dressed in only a white towel at the waist I gripped it tighter and faced the window cleaner who was 3/4 profiling his face and now focusing on only the dirty pane his length of rubber was strigiling. Had he turned as I did? Which of the two lyrics below is the most pleasing? I decided to leave the room for a glass of orange from concentrate and smoked mackerel, perhaps with some of the fruit loaf I knew I had left. I closed the window on the west-facing wall to help the cleaner, to give him a bit of resistance, and to hide from his ears the lines:

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Remember me from one who lives there,
For she/he once was a true love of mine.

A'wonder how many stories window cleaners; and gas men, telephone-line installationists, paper-boys, septic tank-diviners - what sort of stories they tell each other. A'wonder how many variations on the teenager wanking, the au-pair fucking, the cleaner sucking, the dog shitting, the husband throttling they come across and tell their friends in the work. A'wonder if they decide that the stories are boring and start to discuss the changing tastes in wallpaper and dado rails. A'wonder if they have physician-style tradesmen's oathes, or a butler's discretion, never to see and certainly never to tell of.

I'd finished the mackerel and washed down the oil with orange juice when the window cleaners knocked, they wanted paying. What I really needed was an audio recording of 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' and a working-class upbringing.

The Chimneys of Orthodox Churches

The Chimneys of Orthodox Churches
March Larch & Birch over me
In production lines
its crooks with Salts of the Earth
& clogs its pews with incense or slate.

Dynamo spat out Virgins with Children with Halos
Make a stark, (old) contrast with me,
Especially when they're dimly lit.
Unfolding my arm at my elbow I could brush one.

But I wouldn't: I'm choking on inscence
At the part where the 2/4 thumps.
And you weren't round that corner I pictured
Only concrete. on grey. on ground.

I wonder which tomb they'll think suits me,
I wonder what song they'll all sing
As I'm coughed out of Orthodox Chimneys
With Beeswax cloying my wings?