Odd Job Joe

It was all about September;
the sun sat further away.
He’d come to mow the lawn;
as I watched him
from the window
shadows lengthened.

If I went to him, now,
he’d smell of petrol...
newly-shorn grass,
and forest moss.
His touch would be
rough and ready...
a less complicated way
of escaping the mundane...
the same as all the rest –
shallow and flawed,

but way more gritty
and I bet he’d hit
where I longed
to be hurt. A bad fix
almost...one which
leaves you broken
with an empty feeling
in the pit of your stomach
as green fades to brown

neath a darkling sky
where Mars looks down –
scarlet as a ladybug
when he suggests
you might kind of
‘bruise the heather...’
‘trample down some nettles’.

And then he’d leave
in his beat up four-by-four
with its clapped out engine,
as rough as the timbre
of his tone when he’d cupped
my budding breasts,
called them ‘rosebuds’

and a smile flirting
with my lips; satisfied, as I’d be
from that golden moment.
His name – whispered
by thistledown as it blows; no
particular place to go.