A walking question mark,
eyes set on a dead Jerusalem,
his right hand pumping
some terrible piston,
up the lane, past the stagnant pond,
into the Norman wood.
We called him Ajax,
and no one knew why.
We ran away in a mockery of fear,
dared to catch his diamond eye.
Long, thick coat in summertime,
toy sheriff’s badge twinkling,
the bearded nut loped along
the lanes and bridleways,
down through the seventies
into obscurity’s tuneless song.
Some thought he stuck his willy
through the letterbox of a bungalow
containing Scottish children.
The dads of the close
hunted the pervert
in their office shirts,
found only rumour.
He was pointlessly free,
with a child’s small-change freedom.
Only locked into lonely.
Love: a sex-itch unscratched.
I see him old now,
blanched in a bedsit in hell,
drug-shocked and shaking a fist
at the endless Sunday smell.
(image: Dolores, by Izidre Nonell, 1903)
