Kitchens and Poetry – No Synchronicity

I can honestly say I have never written a poem in my kitchen.
Not at my worktop, sink or table – doesn't float my boat.
Too much extraneous matter dampening my inspiration.
Like vacuous plug holes, a proliferation of utensils, cereal bowls clogged with breakfast cereal and scummy coffee cups.

And yet I remember a time when my mother ruled supreme.
Her domain, manic egg whisks, scary pressure cookers.
Delicious bowls of creamy ingredients which tickled my taste
buds until the bowl and the spoon were licked clean with a
domestic assiduity that I have never used since or am just
more hygienic – didn't seem to matter when you are a child.

Now my own kitchen is underused and undervalued.
(Except for my microwave – universal guilty secret!)
Speed is of the twenty-first century essence.
Not the twentieth more relaxed and dedicated approach.

But I see her face in my superfluous saucepans – her persona
as happy as a female Larry – washing, ironing and always
ship-shape and virtuously clean – a contented housewife.

I long now for the conversations over the ironing board.
When she listened and gave just the right answers and views.
She never dragged me into her domain, she didn't like the
mess and bedlam I might make – strange now the absence
of a superlative cook and confidante – that I just pass through
this sanctum to somewhere more conducive and hear her
                                   voice elsewhere