Jan Dean # 22 Scott Street

Scott Street

There on the corner, stripped back

looking grey and bland, once

the Villa Franca where we ate lobsters

almost regularly, in my twenties when

our pockets bulged, but now I live without

them, hardly ever giving crayfish a thought.

What makes me sad? Further down Scott St

there’s a terrace I decided worth buying to name

Dante’s Inferno and turn the underground level

into a nightclub, since party places were rare

here, when I was fifteen in the last century.

I admit the prospect of flooding didn’t enter

my mind. Back to the reason for gloom:

Certainly not lost chances at entrepreneurial

glory or making a killing on real estate.

Which 19^th century remnant was it? Memory

is fickle and depends on importance.

It was probably the one for sale at the time

so long ago. Around about then my life’s

ambition, apart from administering world peace

was to have twelve children and become

a radio announcer, air hostess, kindergarten

teacher or own an Armstrong Sidley

because I fell in love with one and its luscious

leathery smell in a showroom near my bus stop

for school. Those times, pre-five-year plans

we imagined one day ahead

and everything was possible.