All About Me and You

All About Me and You

I’m the kind of person who would have gone to a public
witch burning to find out what kind of kindling was hip,
you would have gone to public hangings to see if the guilty
jerk and spasm, piss themselves; puddle or spray?

Yes, it's true, I would superglue a pound coin to the pavement
to find pleasure out of watching a chancer
trying to pick it up casually, but you would drop
a fifty ton weight. The coin was bait.
You watched far too many cartoons
when you should have been studying for your GCSEs

I might go to the scene of a car crash to collect
the shattered pieces of red and amber glass
for my mosaic. You would want copies of police
photographs, find blood stains and gather up bits of limbs.

It was you that cut pages from hardcore porno, glued
them into library books from the large print romantic fiction
section. You also cut out the final pages
from the who-done-its. Snip. Snip.
I thought it a laugh to cut out the odd paragraph, or write
coded messages on page one hundred and sixty three.

I hate you. I hate you because you told that priest
he smelt like a paedophile and we spent all those years
in purgatory. Because you stood up in school assembly
and declared the headmaster wears frilly lingerie,
that you had seen him in the gym mistress’s PE kit,
we got two months detention; thanks for that.
I hate it that you tell every foreman on every job
to fuck off and we always get the sack
that you always pick arguments with biggest
blokes in pubs, tell every woman that I meet
they look right old scrubbers, ask how much
a blow job costs, insist on drinking until we fall over
into our own carrot infested sick, and it’s because
you called that copper a fascist pig we had to spend
the night in West Ham nick.
I hate that you are there for the thick
but never the thin, that I can’t get the better of you,
I can’t win. I admit, I’m always the loser but still
you had to go on a radio phone-in and tell the nation
I’m a habitual masturbator, knicker sniffer, pussycat fiddler,
you even gave out my real name and where I live.
I hate you ‘cos you live my life whereas I’ve only
courage to be the corpse in the realm of my own head.