Valley of Delights
‘Deano is good in bed’ is etched into
the painted metal of a No. 9 bus shelter,
maybe by his steady girlfriend Nat,
or by the networking Deano himself.
Nat knew she wasn’t beautiful,
except to Deano. Or good, as in ‘saintly’
when beauty and goodness go hand in hand,
but Deano was good to her, despite
being just solvent enough for two cokes.
And nobody could accuse her of being
an elegant part of the elegant universe.
Her world, her street was as ugly as truth,
but beanpole Deano loved her most for being
most different from the others.
Several times he had dreamt of a blue door
up a mountainside, to a temple
or a tunnel, or an old mine-working.
Each time he climbed, scrambled, crawled
to knock and have it opened unto him
the door said ‘Please Use Other Door.’
There was no other door. He treated Nat
to his skinned knees and raw scuffed
hands as proof he had been there.
One day, he said, and there’s always daylight
in my dreams, that door will open for me.
It was a million to one, not bad odds
in infinity, that Deano, who spent the day
praying with coins in a jingling paradise
of slot machines – The Valley of Delights –
would catch Nat as she lit out of Tanfastic
as brown and round as a penny, but he did.
It was odds-on he wouldn’t want her
brown all over, for he loved those shy
sunless English places, but he did.
He thought she had done it for him,
and she thought she must have. Their love
made them special. The upshot
was a proposal, a party, a fatal overdose.
He might have calculated that death
had a more promising future than life,
and decided to let the tokens roll.
His epitaph ‘Deano is good in bed’
can still be found gouged into the steel
of the No. 9 bus shelter, where ‘is’
has been scored out and corrected to ‘was.’
Page(s) 49
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