Although he is a handsome creature,
poodle bitches still glare proudly at him.
Tail in any case an ohmmeter needle,
genitals a pendulum,
Llewelyn, my Alsatian, skips along
beside my shins. He’s approaching middle age,
approaching Marks and Spencer’s camomile-scented bones
and a kennel mortgage,
but his eyes and muzzle and tail all still frisk,
frisk in defiance of a dozen Labrador bitch rejections.
My friend David waits for us at the bus-stop
in new tartan trousers that suit him
like a miniskirt suits a brigadier, that deserve
to be humped by a horny stick-chaser.
“Oi! Get off me, for Christ’s sake, get off!” he cries.
Although I grew up amid this concrete,
I still feel the glare of cement-eyed packs.
Shoulders then just stack up like attic junk,
arms hang outwards
as though preparing to catch something
any second now. My Dad’s northern friends
have laughed before, “Look, he even walks in Cockney!
Go on, buy us a house!”
and I’ll grant my step has a spring, a bounce even,
even though David’s insisting he buys some skunk.
His dealer, Kevin, waits for us outside the park
with a white face and a grey accent
that suits him like a bacon roll suits a muezzin,
gabbling about eighths and quarters.
Then he says to me, “Stop walking like you’re hard.”
