pastor james's heart attack

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Pastor James’s Heart Attack


When the bloke hands you the fish’n’chips
He does it coolly over his till,
Takes the money, slides the drawer,
And gets bloody close to the correct change
Without once taking his eyes off the street outside.

After nilly eighty years of fat, salt, starch and sugar,
My Old Man’s in the Royal Adelaide with a dodgy pump;
Scared enough to put away his ancient fear
Of letting humans interfere in God’s Big Plan to
Come down from the hills in an ambulance,
Take their advice and let em put in a Pacemaker.

Pacemaker? Gazing sideways like a fishmonger at
The reflection in that hospital window,
I got Wyatt Earp riding through the chest of My Father The Preacher,
Who’s lying there like somebody’s just handed him his Last Fish,
When this Pisces Dutch fishing shiela I love
- “Who was that Raven-Haired Beauty?” he asked when she’d gone -
Anyway she walks in for the first time beside me
With fresh fish on her breath and my sperm on her hands,
He goes a sort of dishwater grey as his blood remembers,
And he’s kicking his sheets.

After a long careful gaze of this,
She looks at me like her icecream’s jumped
Off its cone into the forty-plus gutter,
And sees me become that old bastard:
Scared and jittery, lustful and fucked:
A rotting King, flat on his silver back.

No chance of fresh black feathers on that helmet.

Pastor Jimmy puts his trust in The Lord,
Whispers prayers over the phone
To Sylvia my Mother each morning
While she kneels with a Bible in her hand
On a mattress on the floor in my attic
Just over the street from the heart ward.

She sleeps as close to sin as she’s got for sixty years those nights,
Near the bed where I’m sliding silently into my fishy Raven,
Whispering about orgasms.

Wondering how many you can get.

Pastor James gets better with his new electric ticker
- Having put an end to his jealousy of his wife,
Who’d sprach too eagerly of the food at my place -
Takes her back to The Purple Valley and goes on with it.

She’s been a bit of a raven in her day, mind you.
Still is, under the fat and the tangled feathers.

After I introduced her to a slimy mate,
My Raven went off to Sydney on whoring work
And everything’s settled down nicely.

Sometimes, when she’s back here resting,
She does the same shit with her eyes as the fish’n’chip bloke.

Maybe she thinks the window is me.


Philip White














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