While you and I loitered outside the 7-Eleven after school, sucking down one dollar Slurpees, I saw a tangle of sneakers hanging like a cluster of grapes from the power lines.
I said we could harvest them, make bootleg memories that won’t mature until we’re twenty years into the future when we’re telling our stories to our children.
It made you laugh and you dribbled onto your uniform and I could see the colour of your bra. You asked what if it tasted like a ragged doormat. I shrugged. We walked on past the high-hanging fruit for ours is the now. But I looked back and wondered, if in the future, we’d buy from the Bottle-O because it’s convenient, rather than labour for the truth of our storytelling.
This piece was inspired by a line from Omar Musa’s TEDxSydney talk in 2013, Slam Poetry of the Streets. You can view it HERE.
I hope he doesn’t mind the appropriation of his lyric.
A Fullness in Brevity - Adam Byatt 