Smell My Jumper 14/04/24
A Woodbine whiff curled in a soft grey screen
more a drift than an exhale
over his left lip and craggy moorland cave nostril
across his riven valleyed cheek
stinging his left eye - curiously smaller than the right
through his bushy brow
and matching the sixty-something tint
of coif and stubbled temples
Even a cough was somehow choked
not to disturb baccy enjoyment
Now leaving him, to float over
the scrabble of dominoes and beer
on a coppertop table, shiny,
with verdigris edge, where copper nails
sat driven into its metal flesh,
biting the pine beneath
And as the singer with a loaded SM58
flutters her bingo wings, he wonders
what happened to the dreadful Christmas jumper
he gave to Oxfam?
Is some witless buffoon parading it
to the amusement of his gooey, soppy family?
“Oh you’re such a wag. Who’d give such a thing away?”
wittered Bernice, lifting her bumswept face tearfully
“Maybe they’re dead” suggested old Jayne
who knew the singer, actually:
She just didn’t go in dirty pubs.
Out over the dusty crisp pop snotty step
and up the sandstone hill where buses
dropped a whining cog
by the horse trough, moss drunk and lion spewed
by the cenotaph naming folk who’s names where never named these days,
the church hall, corrugated, green and kept by scouts
sits beneath an asbestos roof
lichen-licked (and weathered as the battered faces
of dominatrixes thrashing the late-for-dinner
domino set)
under which the WI prepared
the spring jumble, filching spoils
neatly folding even the rummage stall
raffle-ticketing tins and bottles,
jars and hamper goods not won at Christmas
A tea urn chunters in the dark rusty corner
below a brown stained sagging polystyrene tilescape
whistling like an Irish drunk
slavering down its steel sides and hissing at the pantocast
of handbag wrestlers “oooing” through people’s smalls
Nellie presents a tray of iced buns
in pastels pale as Battenburg
though no-one liked German names
Washed more than worn, the jumper has travelled again
the thought of death tainting it
like farty old tobacco smoke
It is folded centre stall and
they try to figure out who gave it
“He’ll have some explaining to do”
stormed Muriel’s mudslapped face
recalling how she’d spent all last summer
knitting the fkr
WARNING - this poem contains dangerous substance, revolting fluid and a filthy word