OUTSIDE
View of the aimless lonely game
of a schoolboy who is early awake
and goes outside to throw a tennis ball
against a cooking-apple tree
and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark.
It isn’t very noisy play
if it can even be called play
but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours
and if so do they make no complaint
because they understand him being there like that,
on his own,
making something out of nothing,
and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back –
the pity and the waste of time – when,
at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to,
a woman practicing what they call prophecy there
places hands on him
breathes
closes her eyes
and says
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard, but terribly lost:
it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight
it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon...
no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold
and worst of all there is no fruit.
outside
POEM 2025
untitled
VIDEO-GRAB (REFILMED HOME MOVIE) 2026
EAST END