Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Special Edition on Humour June 2024.
Acrostic for Pam, poem by Jonathan Cant.
Acrostic for Pam
Down on her Valium supply, my ex (let’s call her Pam) wore a short skirt and stockings
Into the clinic to impress the doctor at prescription time. If it all went to script—
And it always did, he’d come out renewed, too. And so, with a newfound
Zeal, she’d return home with all she needed to take the edge off her speed comedown.
Examining the packet label one day, I found for her the fineprint warning didn’t apply:
Prescription only medicine. May cause DROWSINESS and may increase the effects of
Alcohol. If affected, do not drive a motor vehicle or operate
Machinery. No problem there. At 33, she’d never held a driver’s licence.
© Jonathan Cant
Jonathan Cant is a Sydney-based writer, poet, and musician. He won the 2023 Banjo Paterson Writing Awards for Contemporary Poetry, was Longlisted for the 2023 Fish Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Prize, Commended in the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize, Highly Commended in the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Awards, and twice selected for the Ros Spencer Anthology Brushstrokes. Jonathan’s poems have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Otoliths, and Booranga Writers’ Centre’s fourW thirty-four.