The Muse [EXCERPT]
It was two months into my stay at the squat
When Jenny painted the eye on the white wall.
Jenny was the mad one
With deep alien – blue peepers
And a scarf she wrapped around
Her bruised neck like a flag of convenience.
She stayed in the corner because she
Said her Daddy put her there
And she wasn’t coming out,
A point she illustrated by
Surrounding herself with toy animals
She’d babynapped from Wilkinsons.
We all had sex with her now and again
Until someone new came along,
So when she painted the eye,
We all figured she was lonely
And drew it for company.
We’d been smoking dope and
Playing football in the park that day,
Queers against straights
Druggies against alkies
The Balkans against the rest of the world:
Just for a bit of a laugh,
So when we got back
We were in a pretty good mood.
It was five feet by five,
A black iris in a yellow pupil
With long green eyelashes
That made me think of that Indian God
Who’d strike you down as soon as look at you.
Jenny denied she’d done it
But her fingers told a different tale.
Two weeks later the eye started to talk;
It told us we were in the wrong
For wasting our lives
For stealing, fighting and listening
To the Velvet Underground all the time.
It seemed particularly pissed off that
We were renting out the rooms above us
To young Muslim boys and girls