Really, What is it all about? By Joe Hakim

It's on days like this I wonder why - why I continue to fill the glasses of these hollow well-scrubbed professional something or others: teachers soiling their brains with the best alcohol money can buy while their pupils kill each other with cheap cider and bullet-bongs;

off-duty policemen drinking beers with limes in the top while their comrades pull gin-soaked beggars off the street; tanked up bank clerks peeling away the stink of bankrupt gamblers withdrawing their last breath; property owners enjoying a cold one while their tenants freeze in damp flats -

I serve them all and listen to conversations and laughter as empty as eyes screwed into faces like broken light-bulbs. They all reek of expensive scent and success, but underneath there's sadness which they could never express; a sense of loss, a life spent in bars in front of a plasma screen and a Sky digi-box.

And then it's my turn, and after they leave and go home I settle down to a drink that I could never afford, and I step outside and light up a cigarette and watch a guy as he picks up all the tabs off the pavement, framed by the ever-present glare of the black cabs' headlights as he splits the butts and sprinkles them into a Rizla.

Copyright © Joe Hakim 2007

Comments System Prototype Version 1.0 by Mo

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