The Company
Some dropped behind sofas or hung on washing lines,
snagged in peg bags and crowded underwired bras.
Others overshot potting sheds and garden gnomes
to break as precinct suicides.
These were no pudding basin gangsters from the shires,
they were sturdy lads
from the Sunday butts who wore their Sire’s badge,
born to the smell of pig shit, with mugwort in their boots.
Carousing after dark in moonlit groves,
hidden in the withy wands,
a scattered retinue of lost men
climb the seasoned beech that vaults the sky.
Shadwell Smith has had poems appear in Snakeskin. This is his first time in Ink, Sweat and Tears. He is also a performance poet of dubious quality.