There she goes,
Her whelp on a string,
Hunching her shoulders of care lopsided,
Draggled with hair
Greasy, dank,
Lank as a dog-tailed thatch.
Clutching her mum’s basket she goes to buy food.
From behind she walks ill,
Ungainly,
Her huge knees locking
At every step,
Her pudding thighs
Large and cumbrous,
Bored
(Clutching her mum’s basket she goes. Who’ll buy?)
And eager to part,
Through the rain, through the pain
Her pigeon toes slap,
Slap, slop,
And propel the dull coat
Afloat on a titupping rear
To the village shop.
Clutching her mum’s basket she goes.
On her white, flaccid face
No emotion, no grace,
No anything much;
Just a sullen, relentless
Trudge in the rain
And the strain
Of a quick-come mum at lost fifteen,
Clutching her mum’s basket.
She.
Mum lit out; slam.
Wham, with her fancy man.
Left
For good three goddam boys,
One husband, drunk; and her,
Now tangled, void,
Afraid
And slovenly kind.
Clutching her mum’s basket.
Her strangled transistor,
Coffined in polythene bag,
Undead abrades the edge of reality,
Scouring the wine-wet laughter of leaf-fall,
Gossiping scutter of beech nut cases,
The fling of a mad, glad, wind in the telephone wires,
Today
And shuts her close,
Clutching at mum.
Awhile in the bus shelter sitting,
Cow eyes at rest
On yesterday’s news,
On shattered glass icicles,
Sweet papers, cans, graffiti
Spewed on the boy-wrenched wood,
“I love you, I love you,”
Clutching her.
But her vacant mind falls
Inwards now
And the D.J. spills his life
In inanity,
Sanity far, far away
From the screaming shell
Of her need.
Eyes dull as a ditch;
Her unquiet fingers, tricked
With such sad-bitten nails
And burns
And a big, glass ring,
Clutching.
Jenny. Jenny-child.
(October,
1972)
