Different versions of me

I've been thinking about, and reading, poetry, rather than writing it, lately. I've been looking back at lots of my old poetry and wondering how I manage to have such an inconsistent style of writing. I didn't come up with an answer. Nor to the question why so many different types of my poetry have been published - and so many haven't. Right poem, right place, wrong poem, wrong place, rubbish poem, etc... 

The following poem, which is unusual even for me, got accepted for publication, but I withdrew it after about 18 months of waiting for it to be published, because I was having a bit of a breakdown at the time and just got cross, which was unfair on the publisher (maybe?), but I couldn't deal with it then. I could resubmit it somewhere else, but I think it stands as good a chance of getting read here as it would anywhere else, so...

The end of the world happened

in a hotel bar on the edge of somewhere

where a man of a certain age

had just been told, without a hint of irony,

that he could check out any time he liked,

and having polished off the nuts

and another double, decided

to say yes to the woman in the lipstick

the same shade his wife had worn before

and knew for once he wouldn't have to pay

and

in a carpark outside a pub in Dungeness

where a woman of a certain age

had just been told, without a hint of irony,

that she could check him out any time she liked,

and having had her cod and chips

and Sex on the Beach, decided

to say no to the man who looked like

all the others and the shag on the shingles

and settled for a fag on the edge of nowhere.