Your sunken eyes
revealed your bed-sit life
in a doss house full
of scar-faced drunks,
your lives pathetically
made possible
by Income Support
and Tesco beer
Your jaw flaccid with pure sulk:
the dark cycle of
job hell or no-job hell.
Ill-fitting words and torn-off
fragments of childish ideas
a doughy mess of verbiage.
Claustrophobically July
Wasps enraging the scrap of wasteland
maddening the air into a hot chaos
hand movements so furiously imprecise
confused, juddery brains
reaching for clarity
Just one dim beacon
a baby from a horrid womb:
LEAVING
packing up,
casting out,
taking off,
running away.