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Alan Hardy

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Bugger

The stitches in skin
tugging at her eyes
as she gazed at me,
gasp of recognition
after thirty-five years,
and all their traumas, and hatreds,
and deaths,
could not hide the little cherub of a face
all those years ago
I had had social contact with.

She showered me with compliments,
then and now, I hadn’t aged at all,
looked, it seemed, deep into my eyes,
romantically, and sincerely.
Speaking of others, conspiratorially,
she would draw close, look away,
pick faults over bellies, ageing gait,
and minds beginning to miss their step.

I started to remember her in her youth,
fresher, plump without the tautness,
the strings drawn tight to squeeze her flesh in,
that shifty look she’d always had
I had felt despite others’ protestations
pushed me into according her a proper regard.

In my youth, told whom to respect, and trust,
one of the good guys,
I had always suspected,
lurking beneath the surface, and its pretence,
there lay the coarse truth,
that, always prone to see the worst in people,
I was a bit of a bugger.

 

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