In particular the twins, her ‘sweet boys’ with
their soft, brown dog eyes – I watched.
I watched them in the showers once, where to all
intents and purposes we were just three grown men
doing the necessary, only I was storing information.

A visual impression of their minute weapons,

peeping timidly out of rough thickets; both of them
hardly bigger than a tomcat’s boast. I could have,
I should have castrated the pair with a sharp
click, click of my brand new dentures.

"Something for ronny to suck on later,"
dreams Doreen, our whey-faced wanderer,
asleep beneath a heap of stale bedding, the end
of an unlit fag softening in her mouth, and

without the wherewithal to light it.

Within a season she and her sons,
the epiphytal ones, burgeoned, then bloomed;
as healthy a trio of Orchid Cacti – pretty
pink petals and thick fleshy leaves straining
merrily towards warmth and hot water.

While I, the egocentric; with only one real trick
agreed, but several useful sleights of hand and a talent

for drawing pictures with a match in spilt gin – that
could have been, that should have been enough to carry
me forward to my apple orchard years – rotted.