A great Sunday morning poet double header, earlier Paul Mortimer's winsome, sentimental paean to all that Amy Winehouse left behind and now Wayne Dean-Richards' The Cleaner, and altogether unwholesome exposition of what is fucking wrong with this land where we live like it's an eternal embodiment of the Stanford Prison Experiment. the cleaner comes from Wayne's collection, 'It's A Mad World But Funny...' (Outsideleft Booklets)
the cleaner
I was the cleaner.
nobody knew my name except the boss
and the boss was never there.
“he’s the cleaner,” everybody said.
and as if to prove them right
I’d clean.
I didn’t speak much,
just got on with cleaning.
till this one guy
grabbed me by the wrist
and tried to throw me
into the shower room
with the showers on.
I’d been cleaning the changing room.
the guy and his pals
had been playing competitive sport
but obviously not enough.
I suppose he was showing off,
thought his mates
would think it was funny if he threw
the cleaner into the shower
and got him all wet.
but the guy got it wrong:
it’s a mistake to think
because a man’s quiet
he’s benign
or weak.
the guy who grabbed me was all smiles till
he saw his mistake.
one punch all it took.
none of his pals said a word,
as I got on with the cleaning.
© Wayne Dean-Richards
Essential Info
The 18 poems comprising Wayne Dean-Richards' IT'S A MAD WORLD BUT FUNNY series are listed below. Outsideleft will be publishing them all throughout 2023. A free downloadable PDF and a limited edition A6 Outsideleft Booklet (for neither profit or loss) of these poems will be available at the end. But not till the end. I am pretty sure that means November...
