He stood, head bowed:
A teenage James Dean skulking,
On a misty evening corner of a long-abandoned street.
Ragged children file by the crumbling curbs,
In this smoggy mausoleum of depravity and oppression,
And wave, like cilia on a smoky lung.
The turf is his, he earned it.
The battered leather jacket, skin of the warrior,
That studded armour of the sadly defiant,
Hangs loosely on thin and sloping shoulder,
That are too weak to hold his world upright for him.
The young hood looks to his grease-slicked hero,
To cast a long and loving shadow that Daddy tore from him.
But all he can do, lip curled angrily over a smouldering cigarette,
Hanging limply and precariously from a sneering snarl,
Is spit upon the moon-cast asphalt of the night,
Deftly and precariously with the apathetic ease of a junkie.
And thus, the blackened heart,
Of a battered, bruised and violated child,
Neglected and left at the mercy of the sharply-cut metropolis,
Bubbles like hot, gummy tar,
On the road......
to emotional oblivion.....
Jane Wanklin
1997.