Being Careful What I Wish For

A new poem

Staring at the squares on the Euro Millions ticket

I’m presented with a choice of five numbers

between one to fifty and don’t forget the stars.

I must make a decision to pick at random

any numbers as they enter my head or choose

birthday dates of loved ones or the houses where

they live. Perhaps the number of my neighbour’s

beaten up Peugeot 205 will bring me fortune

and the World will open up to me presenting 

possibilities I really cannot imagine and of course

problems. I’ll need a good lawyer preferably a

specialist on corporate law to help manipulate

vast sums of money. He will be eye-watering expensive

and then there’s the accountant presenting mammoth

bills to avoid mammoth tax grabs. How to keep it

from the family and my sudden new friends toting

pan-hands. I’ll need to get a different lawyer to deal

with paternity suites from women I never knew

and false claims for sexual misconduct with aging

choir boys. I’ll have to move, but it should be nothing

too ostentatious otherwise they might kidnap my kids

and I’ll have to surreptitiously inform the police because

they’ll kill them one at a time for every day I delay paying

and police are useless and I become childless with a bitter

wife who has a breakdown and runs off with a gypsy

who tries to blackmail me because it was my fault she 

overdosed in the bedroom of his caravan in Andalusia.

The pressure begins to get to me. I empty the bottle

of Highland Park I bought for guests who never came

because they were never invited and thought I thought

I was too good for them now I’m a rich stuck-up prick

and get in my GT Mustang and drive to the nearest Tesco

to get another bottle, but instead take out an Afro-Caribbean

women pushing a fully loaded twin pushchair and skid

on their spilled blood and bury the nose of the Mustang on

the trunk of a protected thousand-year old specimen

English Oak killing it and myself from multiple head and

Internal injuries making national news and vicious headlines.

For the next week I’m eviscerated by the Sun, Mirror and Mail.

The phones of family members get hacked and crucified

I get to be the focal point of Times op-eds and late-night

BBC2 half-arsed pseudo-intellectual talk-crap programmes.

I take a deep breath and tear up the ticket and buy a

two-quid scratch card hoping to win enough for the new

i-Phone my youngest wants and designer Nikes for Emma.