Questionable People

Jack the Tar lay in his cabin
looking up at the stars
but he saw nothing in his head
only some great pink open loving arms.

He felt something like a song surging and last time he sang it the man
in the bunk overhead changed the tune in a bad way,

so instead Jack the Tar climbed up on deck and sighed wearily
saw that it was almost dawn.

Dawn only had to fling open her window to know that it was summer. The
smell of honeysuckle and warm damp grass wafted in but her nose was
blocked as she had a malignant pollen malady .

This was two hundred years ago and she would normally have to get up
and bustle in an hours time and heat up water for the family she was
employed by. But today she was painfully aware of
nothing but ignorance
as she would be dead by dusk.

Dusk is an enchanting almost French part of England, buried between
tight rolling hills. Inside a small cottage is the smell of a goat
which wandered in and some coffee burning the senses awake. Auntie
Agnes opens the letter from her niece and puts on her reading glasses,
smiling gently at the detailed description of the staff party.

"I am so glad for Maureen"

Her own life is too quiet , she hates the weeds and the rotting
undergrowth and the bell ringers and is waiting for change. She looks
forward to the motorway being finished. She never expected it would get
so cosy in Dusk.

Maureen lives in London and all she does is go to work

and back,
go to work
and back

go to work and buy food and tampons with a stifling regularity.

She buys magazines and looks at the beautiful bodies of models and
reads about the reckless destructive things her contemporaries get up
to in the clubs.

She gets undressed and prays before sleep. She has a body that a man
would think he had stroked back to life.

A man enters his house by the back door and notes with relief that his
wife
is not yet home.

He turns on the computer and reads the emails she has sent
and received earlier today,
laughing aloud that she told YoungDude4U in Michigan that she was just
turned 23 and sitting there wearing a red teddy and snakeskin thigh
boots waiting to do whatever he wants.

Poor old girl must get so bored.
He places a steak and kidney pie in the microwave and lights a
cigarette.

Teddy in my cupboard has a gash of lipstick across his chest.
He is a very old bear (about 100 yrs +)
which my lover once gave as a present to his ex girlfriend.

She returned the bear in this bruised condition when he met me. She
could not believe it was over. She said I was cheap.

She squashed Teddy
bent him double
so he would fit through my letter box and he has a broken neck.

Sometimes I look
at his lifeless body
wondering whether or not to complete him by smearing
lipstick over every inch of him.

Should I don't I?
lost my intuition all
those days at sea.
I need to find a witch who knows what I should do about this.
A young witch whose neck will not break from looking up at the sky.