at 18:16

Dinner for One or C'ena Pa Una

Show Me The Treasure 18:16 Edit

Dinner for One

Carol Jenkins

Lost my key to your door

Lost my sense of style

don’t go out no more

Its seems that I’m a bore

Cry in my sleep

Wake up slow

Close the blinds to the sun

doze til noon and it’s

Dinner for one

What a fix I’ve got me in

My ex best friend says you’re a cheat

And she should know

Lost my sense of style

I don’t go out no more

Lost my key to your door.

Dancing with shadows

Talking with thieves

Who should I believe?

And it’s dinner for one.

My ex best friend says you’re a cheat

And she should know

She should know

and it’s Dinner for one.

Walking down King street

I just stare

at other people’s shoes

going out in pairs

and it’s dinner for one.

Cry in my sleep

Wake up slow

Close the blinds to the sun

doze til noon and it’s

Dinner for one

Dinner for One

Window seat please

With a paperback romance

I pretend to read

having dinner for one.

I wrote this Dinner for One song for my friend Janet Swain, who has written some nifty music for it and added in the great line "dinner for one". It had quite a few drafts. Her glamorous muso daughter Lila Swain translated it into Spanish -'C'ena Pa Una'.

NB The photo is from as a series which features this stick-man (made of rocket stems and a piece of chicken gristle) running off from a dinner plate.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

Dinner for One or C'ena Pa Una

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