A Children's Charity Worker

 

That old boss, boy-sized in adulthood,

started out an orphan of neglect,

an eight-year-old nomad who strolled

Blackpool ’s nightmare-dark streets

 

never blacker than the silent rooms

in his own home. In eight summers,

he’d learnt to spark a cigarette,

to drink from flagons of cider.

 

He was thronged with teenage friends

but forgotten by his family.

He loved the rides of that neon beach,

hungered for the adrenaline hit,

 

some rush that sated an instant

his then half-requited love of his parents.

The pitiless years installed in him,

the weary look of autumn.

 

He could only translate his love

into toys for his younger brothers.

But now, he tells his father, I love you

and scarlet women lock him in love’s illusion.

 

His hair greyed young. Under his wisp

of silver hair, his smile’s still bright

as Blackpool ’s illuminations.

He is a mad drunk tumbling out of nightclubs.

 

A charity worker consumed, drinking

for children’s sorrows, from Kinshasa to Kathmandu

and from the past, he pisses into the wind,

no chance, ever, of making if home, safe and dry.     

 

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Reviews

[Gandré]

This is very well written poem, incorporates elements of history, injustice, battered life, lyric narrative. It is a poem, I want to read more then one time, what an artistic mastery, a poetess-juggler you are!

[JRB]

gave me many thoughts to view upon, thanks nice write,
Jan/uisiom

[Nan]

I envision you as compiling a book of these biographies. You carve them with a sharp
mind and let the reader see exactly who is present and mostly who is not.

It's the end that matters Sel, somewhere between the right to act and self pity,
or crawling into a bottle, a failed self endures. And it's all there, someone's history
and one whom we might caricature in our own beings in ways.

That is the beauty of your depth, Sel, genuine and waiting to tell the truth. No, he was
not a bad man at all perhaps compassion leads us to the irony of the last line.

Nan

[Donald Meikle]

Ah Sel, you bring back memories of rides we stole and could never buy. What a picture of reality you paint with normal words. Pissing into the wind said it all so well. I could almost step aside to let him stumble by.

[Emily B]

You draw such striking portraits of people. We feel that we know your subjects intimately. That is such a gift.

[W.k.kortas]

Love is, even at its best, a spiky maze where past, present, and future are interchangeable and difficult to distinguish from each other-- so this piece tells us, and it does so powerfully, visually. This is fine, fine writing.