A girl in a wheelchair

Outside Somerfield, about to re-enter my Rover
I hear a helium-filled voice, calling me over with
"Hello? Hello?"
And so
I turn round to the phone box, from whence comes
the sound - and down below, not two foot off the ground,
a girl's red head. What's she doing down there?
"Can you let me out, sir?" And so it comes to pass,
I pull back the door, the frosted-glass part of
which has concealed a wheelchair. I do what ablebody
would do - assume she needs more, go for the handlebars,
but, like one of those roadblocked stolen cars in Starsky
and Hutch, she backs up, with a cursory "Thank you so much",
turns on a sixpence, and shoots off.

I survey the scene, as she rejoins her mates, doubled over, in
stitches, and she mock-remonstrates with them:
"Yer bastards! Yer bitches!"

How I laugh.

Roll, little cripple, roll like the wind,
and if not like the wind, like the exclusion-defying draught
that always gets in.
Roll back to your life, your orgy of choices,
Westlife or Radiohead, silence or voices.

Said the seamstress to the bishop,
I had lost the thread.
So thank you girl, for the will not to be dead,
to kowtow to my demons of medical abuse.
This muse has legs, though loose ones, shapeless
and withered by years of non-use.

Thank you, mostly, for catching this moment.
The one that nearly got away.
"It were that big."
I owe you.
Big time.