That Nora Jones Song is Still Drinking Lattes

 

The earth gets tetchy

            but smoothes things over

            with a reference to a message on a t shirt

            claiming the problem with winter is coats

            covering humorous messages on t shirts. 

 

Swinging from glib to bleak it imagines 

            a troll by a bridge yelling horrid 

            dodecaphonic melodies into a parrot’s rib cage. 

 

A second parrot is reconstructing jazz 

            from text books but only getting 

            as far as pecking

            the keys of a gutted piano 

            with its flaky keratinous beak.

 

Meanwhile a third parrot

            a PR consultant in a polo shirt

            is absent-mindedly flinging 

            glossolalic tongues into a river 

            teeming with tiny cotton crocodiles. 

 

The parrots meet in a pub

            laughing and nodding in agreement 

            as each takes turns to say 

            the only sentence they know: 

 

this

            is not

            what I signed up for.