Fourteen
What was a girl to do – having abandoned middle-aged parents to the racing,
read NME down to the small ads for guitar strings
and African drums,
traced a path across a landscape
of polystyrene tiles –
but set out like an explorer down the crazy paved path
past the rickety dove-cote
obese gooseberry bush
and go search out the women
who wore red satin panties.
I’d come across them accidentally on banana coloured walls
on the factory estate at the end of our garden.
A black and white tiptoeing cat and me
caught in the pocket of a slow Saturday afternoon.
He sniffed between pineapple weed,
shattered bricks, while I stared past
stacked telephone directories, a clock
forever at two-thirty, to the women whose
beautiful breasts should have been
displayed on billboards across town
or in the National Gallery. All that cream
weight, the perfect upward slope from the ribs,
those two electrifying knots.