This a re-write of a poem written during a poetry group workshop a couple of years ago. It's lain dormant ever since.
UNCLE BILL
Uncle Bill was a wicked man. Mother said
as much each time the departing Triumph
got the curtains twitching down the avenue.
She’d sniff the blue smoke, fold her arms
and step indoors. He’d walked out
on two wives and dumped a mistress
(as it happens, off the back of his motorbike
in the middle of Richmond Park).
The moustache – Clark Gable style – above
a row of gleaming teeth; the sideways glance,
the shift of eyes away, the quick, one-sided
grin that passed for interaction; a whirring laugh
in the back of the throat, like clockwork
in reverse – evidence all of a long steep
fall from grace away from magnolia walls,
The Hay Wain and a well-cut lawn.
Mum was on her own. Any man who could
whistle like a locomotive, spit plum stones
into the fire across a crowded room,
stump upstairs like Grendel coming home,
farting loud on every riser, change a set
of spark plugs in a storm on Kingston Hill,
switch the pipe to the side of his mouth
and float smoke rings like shaky haloes
ceiling high, was a buccaneer in tweeds
and leathers, unsafe, risky, blowing in
from a world beyond the garden gate.
10:29:03 PM 
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