Freddy

FREDDY Freddy wears his hat upon his head. his bed.

He sleeps in it. His dreams are tailored to He puts his coat on not because it’s cold – he wears it on the promenade, watches

bold girls burning in the sun. His trousers high above his feet, his flies undone, he sags into a painted public seat. Against his skin not separate but just as thin he holds a cotton smell, the proper place or so he tells; if he took it off he’d be quite at a loss to recognise his bones. His pockets sway beneath the torn panels of his coat, swollen with pipe , purse and baccy tin; a thin film of laminated card or wood to help dislodge his molar food; tight balls of rag he flattens by and by

to wipe the moisture from his eye, to rub his nose and blow things in. He wears a shirt, a collar’s wing, but where you may have seen it neatly folded back beneath the antique elegance of his coat, an old black tie knotted halfway up his throat flies like feathers on an old crow’s wing. When parsimonious notes are tendered from a reluctant public purse – attended by carrots, threats or something more – his black tie rises to his jaw; whatever begins to hover on his lips the stern glass partition nips in flight, with no admission of a single mote. He turns folding with furtive care the notes inside his battered baccy tin and shuffles through his personal haze towards the door.

******************** p.e.jones