You can’t be bored when you’re reading
(Half an hour in the Arts Centre Café-bar on a Saturday night.)
A poem
This is one of those long tables near the bar.
It’s vaguely lively here now. (If there is such a thing?)
There’s a pint and a packet of crisps.
There’s an all-gender toilet where everyone avoids washing their hands –
unless they’ve been spotted coming out of a cubicle by another person.
Then they make a show with water and liquid soap and deranged hand-drying devices.
There’s hugs between fat men in their thirties wearing lumberjack shirts
and pretentious post-graduate artists stitching pieces of thick unbleached paper together over posh red wine and small packs of nuts
There’s tired staff cleaning up behind the café-bar and distracted bartenders tolerating semi-drunk bores
A trickle of filmgoers leave the cinema and a few of them grab halves of cider
A sad lonely alcoholic, burnt-out and lost, taps his phone hoping to discover the meaning of his life, finding nothing but more of the same banal content.
A bored security guard, hands in pockets, ambles up and down through the gaps between the tables.
The cinema projectionist has left his booth and meanders around the café-bar, suddenly realising he has to put a film on.
The staff are mostly bored and distracted by their phones or each other.
The sad alcoholic goes outside for a fag and decides to give up for the night and grabs a bottle from the corner shop (the booze is cheaper in there) then shuffles home to his empty room.
The Cinderella behind the bar shrugs her cardigan off her shoulder and hopes her Prince Charming will feel the pull.
Two freeloading young women walk in from the streets and glug the free water from the tap on the counter with fake eagerness.
The bored wife reads a library book, and sups a half pint across the table from her boring husband who is cradling a pint and writing crap in a notebook,
She says: “It’s not a library book,” and “You can’t be bored when you’re reading.”
And he thinks, ‘True, I’m reading (and writing) the room.’