Dedicated to someone quite (and quietly) cool. This is more hopeful than it first appears, I promise…

Behind the beauty
There is this heavy nothing
The husband holds his belly in as he rescues another
Endangered beer bottle from the cooler bag

Now, two brats on a gap year
Drink, then vomit, then chat up
Potential trophy wives
Freshly arrived from their small town of the damned back home
And repeat
You keep waiting for something bad to happen to them
But
They are too dull for an interesting overdose

The wife watches the lifeguard who watches the teeny bopper in her string bikini
While she watches the stereotype on his motorbike
And thinks she is in the pages of a 80s magazine
Designed to look like it was from the 50s

The granny reads an erotic thriller
While the grandpa dies in bed alone
Some right wing TV show giving comfort as he
Gasps his last

Tonight everyone (except grandpa)
Will dance to cheap music and drink expensive wine
Some will have sex that they wanted
But most will have sex that they didn’t want
But believe that was the price to be paid

And just as I am about to scream, implode maybe
I see a woman drag a deck chair to the left of centre nowhere
Away from the chatter and the giggles
And moronic mumbo jumbo
She reads from a battered paperback
Lost in the story
I fall in love, hands in pockets, not moving
I am wise
For a change
And do not go and talk to her.