I’m grunting like a pig and pounding like a dog,

dig my nails deep into his buttocks.

You’re not doing me, I’m doing you.

Jessie the Ballbreaker, I don’t think so.

You want it so bad, you mouthy cow.

I’m thinking Lucy Negro, I’m thinking Louise-Marie,

I’m thinking Prince Charles & the 3 Degrees.

Hip hip hoooray, I’macoming, I’macoming …

Need a soul of steel, me, tap-tap, anyone in?

Forged by a Sheffield blacksmith.

Instead it’s Jessie what is Humpty-Dumpty.

Jessie what is Jonah, Jessie what missed the Ark.

Jessie what is napalmed.

It’s talk we gonna talk, Jessie.

You’re soaked through and the storm ain’t done yet.

You’re clinging so tight I’m choking.

What happened at Versailles? What happened way

back when? Come on, Jessie, rain on me again.

You’re a bad lot, a rotten stinking guttersnipe,

said that Evelyn Soames pinned to the ground,

red-faced and gagging. You lot aren’t invited

to our houses for tea ‘cos you’re not respectable.

Everyone knows the orphans on the hill

’cause all the weekend trouble in town.

I was of no stock, let alone good stock

but good punching stock, aye, so take that on the nose

spotty flea-bag-seen-your-dirty-knickers Soames.

Like we weren’t under lock and key after school.

Like we didn’t fear the devil more than anyone.

Like we weren’t good kids, real, real good kids.

Some things should be forgotten, sweetheart.

Some things take me back to first post.

You want my insides, Stanley, well, come on in …

The Convent

Sister Mary Patrick governed St Ann’s

The Holy Terror or Old Nick

we called that Reverend Mother on account

of that switch dangling like a horse whip

from the corded belt of her black habit

next to the keys and brown rosary beads. We’d

do anything to avoid her in the puce-green

corridor, the tapping of her heels coming at you thirty

yards away on dark green tiles.

She was a demon risen from the dead – the sting

coming down on your naked backside.

You were born a sinner so whether

you’d been naughty or not punishment

was due and say thank you after.

You half-wit! You ninny hammer! You gombeen!

Now Sister Mary Peter ruled the nursery.

A flush-faced, beer-drinking puff of roly-poly ball

was the nearest I had to a mother, not

that she were allowed to touch her charges

beyond nappy changing and feeding. I’d

been dumped straight after birth. Me

and Mabel Calloway both shared a bunk bed,

were best friends but forced to hide it, intimacies

forbidden, convicts forced to sleep with arms

crossed over chests like we had the filthy minds.

What went on with those nuns?

Hoping we’d end up Brides of Christ like

all of them, sex-starved Sisters of St Ann’s,

slotting between Old Nick and Roly-Poly Peter

on a sliding scale of evil and kindness.