Prostitute - Richard Dawson

There has to be more than this

Is there no reason for me to exist

But for as a plaything of miscreants, malingerers, dastards and knaves?

How is it so

A child can be bought for a year’s worth of grain?

In this day and age

It’s hard to explain but it happens again and again

I’ll never forget the scene

Where the freckled jowls contort across my father’s face and disappear under

the wheels of the cart

Then the sky parts

Pillar of rain

It is my mother

In another life

If I ever had children of my own

I’d cleave them to my breast

And convey them far from this country of demons made flesh

My last bedfellow is choked to the death on a dummy of puke

I stole this horse, Old Speckled Brownface

From the royal tannery

Haunches glossy with sweat

We burst through the birch

Turn our heads north

With dawn in our lungs we reach the border