Well, this is interesting.

A kind soul wrote to let me know that a person going by the nick “Irishlass” has posted a rather winsome poem on the arts and literature forum on a site called facethejury.com. Here’s the poem in full. I’m sure she won’t mind if I post it here:

They have taken away the chair
where you would have sat

My fingers are cold
wrapped around an overpriced tea

The waiter asks if I need the bill
and I am still waiting to begin

(Perhaps you have forgotten
perhaps dead, or asleep)

The busy smooching of valentines cloy the air
and I have picked your rose bare

you are not here

I silently gather my warrior words
and wait

Bravo, that girl. Quite the evocative little poem, no?

Later in the thread, someone asks her to explain the meaning of the poem. She states:

“The scene is in a cafe in the city centre. It’s Valentines Day, a personal anniversary and also a ritual meeting place. They haven’t left his chair because he hasn’t been by for a long time, and they don’t see the significance, they think I’m alone. (In Dublin if you are not sitting with company they take any extra chairs) Its not closing time, there are still couples canoodling in the cafe. They ask me if I would like the bill because my tea is now cold which would mean I have been sitting a long time and not purchased anything else.

I am waiting because if I give up waiting I have to admit to myself that he’s not going to come. I’m protecting myself, or denying myself the truth because it makes reality easier to cope with.

That’s basically a simple summary. I’m waiting for someone who is never going to come.”

…which is interesting, because when I originally wrote the poem in 1992, I wasn’t writing about a cafe in Dublin at all - and I wasn’t drinking tea, but coffee - plus the poem was called Loving Me Not.

In fact, I was writing about a night in mid-February 1992, when I sat in Pagliacci’s restaurant at the heart of downtown Victoria, waiting for someone to show up, and hurting.

We were friends, good friends, and I had an eighteen-year-old-girl crush on him, which never amounted to anything. We’d made an arrangement the night before, or at least, I thought we had. Over coffee on the balcony of the common room, over looking the sea, he’d mentioned going into the city the next night, and I’d murmered that I had similar plans. He said something about maybe getting some food, and I, being eighteen and blinkered, took that as meaning “See you in Pagliacci’s, our favourite restaurant, for a romantic dinner at eight, then”.

Neither of us realised the significance of the date.

Pag’s was (probably still is) a popular place, with great food and an amazing atmosphere. I used to go to all the time when I was studying over there. Used to love the anticipation, queuing down the block - there was always a big line-up. Used to enjoy getting there early enough to get a good seat for the jazz later, sitting elbow to elbow with complete strangers, gorging myself on Caesar Salad, Manhattan Transfer with real walnuts and real New York Cheesecake, so good it made everyone shut up when savouring it, so rich I might as well have rubbed it directly on my thighs. Used to love trying to get served beer (and usually failing), and settling instead for frothy cappuccino with soy milk, before I even knew what soy milk really was. Used to enjoy the repleteness of an enormous dinner, more filling and satisfying than anything the college cafeteria could ever have dreamed up, the company of friends (or not) in the city, the guilty pleasure of a meal we couldn’t afford, the slow wander back to the bus to take us back out to the boonies.

The night after our conversation, I showed up at the restaurant at a quarter to eight. As always, there was a long queue outside to get in, made up mostly of couples. The women clutched Valentines roses in their pale hands; the men clutched their women. The queue inched forward, and when I got to the front of the line, I told the waiter that I was expecting a friend. He seated me at a table for two in the window, and I waited.

When half eight came, the waiter asked if I would like to go ahead and order - so I asked for salad, which came and went, though I barely touched it. At nine, pasta, dipped with crusty garlic bread, and by quarter to ten, dessert - chocolate cheesecake, rich and smooth, like the other customers in the restaurant. Throughout the evening, I asked the waiter if he wouldn’t mind sticking his head out the door and checking in the queue outside to see if my friend was waiting there, trying to get in. The waiter would peek outside, and then shake his head and shrug as he came back inside. There was no-one outside waiting for me, and I was waiting inside for no-one. During dessert, they took away the chair where my friend would have sat, because they needed it for another table. He wasn’t going to come.

I had nothing else to do while waiting - no book to read, no walkman, nothing, which is very unlike me. No-one likes to sit and look lonely, so early in the evening I borrowed a pen from the waiter and wrote tiny words on the fronts, backs and insides of four Piet Mondriaan cards I’d bought to send to friends back home. A letter of frustration. A letter about waiting in a busy restaurant. A letter about coming to an uncomfortable realisation. I still have it - sellotaped into an old diary, printed on the front with the words “the Pagliacci Notes”.

By ten o’clock, I was out of excuses. He hadn’t missed the bus, he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t just running late: he wasn’t coming. The waiter asked if he should bring me the bill, and I nodded silently. He disappeared into the back of the restaurant, and appeared a few minutes later, empty handed.

He couldn’t do it, he said. I looked too sad to pay. No-one should wait on their own in a restaurant on Valentine’s night, he said. He’d paid for my dinner out of his tips for the evening. He told me that the guy I was waiting for was obviously a moron, and that if I wanted to go out for dinner sometime soon, he’d be happy to take me. He scrawled his number on a napkin, and told me to call. I left the busy restaurant, smiling through the nearly-tears.

So that’s what I was thinking when I wrote that poem, in February 1992. I wasn’t in Dublin. I wasn’t drinking tea. It was a legitimate experience, a hurtful, personal experience, and some random person on a message board has tried to steal it and pretend it happened to them instead. God that’s irritating.

Quick lesson for would be experience thieves: if you’re going to run off with a piece of writing and pass it off as your own, bear in mind that Google knows all.