My Mother is a Sunday
counting ceiling roses,
turning down the volume 
on the street. A Rubik’s Cube clicking 
slowly. She is a television 

of longing for dry stone walled fields
and mahogany sideboards
and china figurines in the back 
of the Mail on Sunday magazine.

She is a shut up sweet shop
and the turning back 
from the queue for the tearoom.
 
I am the next day
which, if it was left up to her,
wouldn’t be a Monday.

I am waved off by a conga line 
outside the job centre 
someone asks me to bring back a noose 
woven in Inca colours
I am helping the local economy by
feeding my electric meter as if it is
a one armed bandit
and sending postcards from the Social Security office
where I take numbered tickets to enter 
a raffle I never win.
Sometimes they send cheques 
I don’t say thank you for
as if it’s birthday money from an absent parent
I think is the least they should give.
I go on day trips to my bedroom and spend 
hours balancing my broken bed 
on different combinations of books.
I meet like-minded people existing in
novels and can’t afford the library fines.   
Some parents cover their children 
like a duvet
or a sniper 
but I am untethered as a bat-shaped kite  
a child has let go of on purpose 
because it is embarrassed.

The window of the white Cortina is wound down at speed,
and the car screeches off in a cloud of laughter
as a boy bellows; ‘Run, you fat cow!’
I think perhaps it was because they’re disenfranchised,  
enraged by low employment and few educational opportunities.
Or, they’re cut off from sources of power and pride 
with traditional models of family and home under threat.
Possibly because they’re maligned and discriminated against 
when modern masculinity is in crisis and the only outlet 
for their identities  is to impose them on others.
They’ve probably experienced abuse and aggression themselves 
and project their anger toward helpless targets. 
Maybe my running symbolises freedom and a purpose they are denied,
 thus they denigrate anything that represents their own thwarted ambition.
Then I think, actually,
perhaps it was just because 
they are knobs.