From Dylan Thomas's Hunchback in the Park to Larkin's Mr Bleaney, cloistered in his shabby rented room, a legion of solitary old men tramp through my imagination and some of them occasionally manifest themselves in my writing.
No one sees or acknowledges them but they're always around: companionless on park benches, smoking roll-ups on street corners or shuffling round supermarkets with their sad, half-empty shopping trolleys ... the elderly, the unloved, the invisible.
TIMEWASTER
There in his lap, the toad hands squat,
unmoving, on his stained cord pants.
Unblinking, rheumy eyes stare out
at nothing in particular.
A tweedy flat-cap crowns his head
and stubble, like shorn, silver wheat,
encrusts his sallow, sagging jaw.
He wears a parka-coat of sorts,
a form of camouflage, perhaps,
and boots, each toecap battle-scarred,
war-wounded as a tomcat's nose.
His own nose is a pigeon’s beak
that pecks halfheartedly and drips
as though his life were seeping out,
as hope does, leaving just a husk.
To passers-by, the quick, the young,
he is, of course, invisible.
A muffler, like a woollen snare,
winds round his wisened, scrawny neck
to trap and hold and tether him
to this municipal park-bench:
a humdrum, ancient loiterer
with pockets full of coins and keys,
put out to grass, adrift, alone,
exchanging walls for parkland trees.
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