Paul J Penton – Songwriter

Not so much a piggy bank as a complex architectural conundrum, a frosted blue facia gives an insight into the insides of a square with mulltiple levels and walk-ways  and slots, the money will roll down the lanes and then free fall into the appropriate hole. The coins that leave smell of multiple transactions on your hands a fatigued metal smell, a ‘been in someobody’s pocket on a hot sweaty day’ smell, yeah, You know it. When the Frill knecked lizard and the possum drop down into their chutes they clack along the lanes and then drop with metallic chink onto their pile, home again. For days I would contemplate the growing pile of silver and copper, tempted, shoved in fact to insert the keys in the top and take it all out and spend it. Where does that impulse, that thought come from? The discipline of ’saving being tested sorely. Instead I rattle the box and flip the coins seeing if I can make one come out the way it went in – way to complex.

Of course yeah I did have the standard ones, it had a rubber grommit in its guts, easy to take out the dough and splash it on a set of model soldiers, or something for the train set – oh for discipline!. Its face looked pretty happy, it’s glossy body glazed into a sheen of pink luminosity, with a ribbon around its neck. when I was disciplined I’d go to the bank, it seems a small arm would have reached up over the counter and handed the clerk a well worn bank book, a passport for my money, figures entered in handwritten beauty- going home sitting on the bed looking at those figures growing for my trip to Europe, to buy the ‘big’ guitar. Contemplation of what I can put into the slot machine near the bed, what odd jobs can be done to earn a few more shiny bits of round metal to roll and clink.