THE LOST BOY
Sally Odgers.

There’s a boy who snorts cocaine
He hits his mother
He’s a ball of hate, he loathes society
Hated school
Smokes fags and tortures dogs

There’s a boy who eats mud cake on the sly
He doesn’t understand his mother
Pats her on the head, says; ‘Lose the bumbag, Ma.’
Thinks his sister sucks
But helps her with her maths

He mugs old women, he has to have money for drugs


He struggles with an essay on a book he really hated

He lights a fire and torches Sunday schools


He cuts the kindling, he cuddles cats

He wears a Nazi symbol on his shirt
He gets in trouble again, but it isn’t his fault
how can it be his fault
when there’s always someone else to blame?

‘Do you work at being stupid?’ he asks his sister.
‘Der,’ she says and kicks him. ‘Remember I’m related to you.
Is it hard to get so ugly?’
‘Der,’ he says. He looks in the mirror and shrugs.

He’s picked up in a raid on a crack house -
How can you blame him for choosing to be there?
He scowls at everyone
He blames the world

‘Does this jumper look all right?’ she asks.
‘Yer right,’ he says.
‘Try the other one. Yeah, that looks better.’



Nothing that happens is his fault
It’s all the fault of the cops, the schools, the government, society
The old women mugged - it’s their fault, innit?
Daring to carry money.
The girl whose face was slashed
It’s her fault, innit?
Daring to walk alone

He tinkers with wires and he knows how to make a bomb.
He knows how to poison you in twenty different ways.
He knows how to fire a gun, to hot-wire a car
He knows, and knowledge is power.
He never seems to use the knowledge; to have it is enough

He carries a knife and he’ll use it

He cuts the tops off carrots

He punches his girl, she looked at someone else

He punches holes in assignments, wants an A. Gets a B.
Bugger it.

‘It’s wrong to steal.’ Only idiots believe in that.
Why should others have what he has not?

He knows how to make apple cider too
It’s seething quietly in the pantry
He reads Robert Westall in the bath

He carves the toilet walls

He reads his text books by the fire.

He scrawls obscenities

He reads New Post in the kitchen
Stirs the soup





He comes in late or not at all
He’s real.
He’s there in films, in magazines, he’s there in poetry.
He’s there in galleries, in prize-winning novels
In government policies, and on TV.
In earnest docu-dramas

HE IS THERE

Homework keeps him up till one o’clock
He’s real
But where is he in art, in literature?
Where is he in policies, in prize-winning poetry?
In docu-drama?
Where is he, the lost boy?
Why the hell don’t we show the flag for him?


Isn’t he as worthy as the other?