A Man of the Last Century
You were balanced on a bar stool
balanced on a bar
as ambivelent south Londoners
watched you play guitar –
Tooting had never seen the like before
You ripped down a poster
from the high brick wall
and lugged the trophy back
We found it curled in the hall –
Terminator 2 in Gassiot Road
The wild night you leapt from
bonnets of parked cars
leaving your shoe prints
evidently marked –
the coppers took you in
We poured back pints in the
Whores and Gloom
kidding the tired nurses
we were the gifts in the room –
the Northern Line shook the urinals
The mother of your children came
and took you away
our child removed
to North London’s sober ways –
I have never seen the like again.