The garden served little purpose It sprawled across the bored ground, despondent beneath the yawning sun My mother would wail her annual rage At the snarling weeds that softly smothered the flowers How I loved those flowers Rejected footballs perplexed the lawn Their obtuse hulks spoiling that ripple of green I found a four leafed clover there once He poked his obscure head above his brothers: a suicide mission to bring me luck They are all dead now I didn’t waste nearly enough time reclined on that jealous cushion Watching the lethargic clouds wobble on
But most otiose of all in that seldom wandered paradise was the Wall That Wall was never high enough I see it from my back door Squat, depressed, sighing, each dusty clot of red brick seems so lifeless Doomed to live out the rest of its days as a failure All flung ***** that compress their rubbery bodies against it will soon vault over It crudely bookends the busily neat hedge Simply because that is where the drunken soil runs out It fails too at its chief instruction: Be the purgatory bridge between Our heaven and Their hell But the Wall was never high enough
I remember the other side of the Wall How I crouched in filth Needless to be afraid of a cut from a single blade of grass Impoverished chickens clucked in the squalor How they survived such malnourishment awed me The friends I thought I had there cheated me And I ran from that disastrous place Where chaos twisted the agonised branches of the hedge we shared But it followed me like an age old Gypsy curse Even today, a writhing, mewing splodge of night will sit on the Wall Looking too fat for its own fur coat It will viciously attack the thin air for a while Perhaps accept a stroke but, seeing no morsel, wander home But I am not spared For I can see its wasteland kingdom from my window
It is not an evil place But the Wall was never high enough