INAPPROPRIATE WORK FLIRTING





Wrigleyville, Chicago, 2015,
N Lakewood Avenue,
just a block or three
away from Wrigley Field, the
chewing gum-magnate-named
Chicago Cubs baseball Mecca,
Blues Brothers saluting-tourist attraction.
Million-dollar homes, fur coat and knickers too,
prying eyes, curtain-twitchers, police informers.
Sensible, clean, frowning, diligently protected,
far from the boorish noisy boozy throngs
who invaded the area on playing days
Chanting about ‘Murica, their team,
white middle class greatness, a real
whole best-avoided scenario 
from zero-stadium-parking game 
start to somebody-disappointed finish.
Anyway, round this terminal corner
a chubby nurse was flirting with me, 
cooing over my Scottish accent, salivating,
running my words over her savouring
tongue like a fine exotic Celtic wine,
trying and tasting and testing to destruction
cringe-worthy words, fumbling inexact syllables,
as I stood in bemused fucksake shock
at the absolute inescapable
bottom-line wrongness of
flirting with a foreign caregiver
as you fished and fingered
Splopping farty chunks
of stinking runny human shite 
out of the stubbornly-retaining arse
of a man nearing death, or
‘transitioning’ as the hospice doctor
would later put it upon his last 
death-avoiding semantics
headshaker that’s-all visit
to a wailing in-denial disbelieving wife
Forty-eight hours tops, so sorry, 
and don‘t forget to pay through the nose,
we accept all major credit cards.
The nurse had given the constipated, 
near-finished man a failed enema earlier
on coming into the house, and was
unconcernedly scooping his waste
Out onto some white medical pads on the bed,
so normal, like you would flirt with somebody
like this any dying day of the week
And who knows, maybe she did.
I have to say, though, this was wildly inappropriate,
and American nurses seemingly needed some 
training in what would constitute 
the right flirting times and places, 
because sure as Hell when you were
coaxing what looked like the contents 
of a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie can
out of a sadly dying man’s anus was
definitely not one of those times,
and I really wasn’t all that 
flattered for some 
gorge-rising
reason.

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