From: "Love T.K.O."

Collecting the Milk Money

From a chilly Friday evening
with the makings of a storm,
we can snatch a breather
in the bay of this kitchen
while she scratches beneath
her make-up bag for her purse.

The announcer welcomes us to
BBC Radio News - Good Evening -
and once her husband has looked us over
we can make ourselves at home.

We come in pairs to this house.
We like to catch her mid-routine,
coating her lashes, her black hair drying
or seen to, in full flight selecting shoes
for a Friday night out
and calling in the sitter,
a girl we know from school.

She was once a City Centre starlet,
clubbing far beyond her Father's curfew.
There were 3rd division footballers
to date, feared pregnancies,
the odd-married man. In town,
the village boys collected round her.
Her girlfriend's boyfriends frequently proposed.
She could take her pick.

She chose a local man with a fair income
and he whisked her away
to this reclaimed stone estate.
He promised her joy eternal
and holiday's abroad, a life
her Mother could never dream of.
The tetchy suspicion in which he held her
she could settle for, because
it told her she was still wild.

Even in her Forties, her figure fuller,
with her face begun the landslide,
her beauty is not extinguished
but self-contained, like light behind curtains,
and all the ornaments that adorn her,
the accessories of her marriage
(husband, children, house) become her
and keep her at a distance.
Yet what she was is all there,
in the cutting come-back,
her way with small-talk that slides
into bigger things, the births, the deaths,
the serious diseases of her world.
No longer claiming but being,
her status is crystallised and fully-formed
and truly hitting home.

And we boys would love to lie
where her chain lies, round her neck
and tumbling below her neck-line,
but her life is made without us.
We are the milk boys, all eyes, all dreams,
and should we see her tonight
in some country pub our dad drove us out to,
she may nod and say hello,
but that would be all.