The Fourth Quarter    by  John West

We stood
uneasily together
on the soft casings of my butts
machine-gunned off
after the skirmish we'd had at home
until the final siren
allowed us to leave,
to walk up through the park
and along the dozen streets
we'd spent our lives exploring
and he talked
in nervous bursts,
all the time
aching to Atom-Bomb my silence,
to reach across and hold me
in his once-big arms,
arms which had had
most of the muscle leached from them
by year-piled-on-year of illness
but this was 1967,
it was a small country town in Australia
and no-one
was about to let him
do that…

© John West

from his book Falling Over Jogging
pub. Pabulum Press 1997