They appear to believe they’ve laid the patio
of everyone’s dreams: beautiful,
lovingly made, fashionably disordered.
You can see from their faces they’re proud
of their work, proud of themselves —
though it’s a haphazard, crazed mess,
compounded of slabs of different sizes
that simply don’t fit together —
gaps chinking through — some slabs broken,
others cracked, or dribbled with paint.
And they’ve put in no foundations, no hard-
core, no sand, and it’s all just plonked
down on the grass of their back garden.
They tell me, it does what it’s meant
to do, for them, it works well, it works fine.
