Vagabond Scatter
In May, Sweetie gave up folding fake flowers in order to comb
the London Underground with more straggle than most.
Cardiff had been a real kick in the head–passive parents,
parochial schools, drunken boyfriend, premature angst.
At seventeen, Sweetie needed a break from Welsh Gothic
and migrated to London to catch up with her black sheep of the family uncle
who had set up shop as an analyst to the theater crowd.
A small plastic monkey that her uncle Colin had picked up
in Cardiff hangs from the top of his bedroom mirror frame.
In the bottom corners of the frame, he had stuck
a photo of himself as a baby being held by his mother
and a photo of himself at nineteen with long hair
and a naked girl with flowers between her teeth on his shoulders.
Sweetie stayed in Colin’s flat for a couple days
before she got tired of his preoccupation with bringing home Brighton bimbos.
Hoping to carve out her own empire, she joined a rag-tag troupe
that performed folk tunes on acid for loose change.
Sweetie wore out her welcome in about a month and bummed a ride
to Oxford to catch up with her gay older brother who was lecturing
on Virginia Woolf at one of the colleges for a term.
She had taken her uncle’s plastic monkey as a good luck charm,
but posted it back to him after only a week of boozing with Oxford’s best and brightest.
Summer was coming and Sweetie missed the peacocks at Cardiff Castle,
the aroma from her father’s tobacco shop, the ballerina
in her heart, and taking refuge in her mother’s arms.
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