Estranger

What is it like to be liked

To have one's company sought

To be the repository of invites

To set rejections at nought?

And is it good to have friends

Who want to share their time with you

To fall out with and make amends

Because things are best with two?

I ask because I've never known

Not really and I've always wondered

Which missing pair of chromosomes?

What way, (you know, SOMEONE blundered)

Who else is there to blame, you see

For how the charismatic desiree

Differs so very much from me?

Am I even of the same sapiens family?

I remember a slinky foe braying

They burnt the wrong parcel, darling!

A snide reference to the afterbirth

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Oh! What mirth

No never is the unlovely spared

Never with her, anything shared

Except the digs, the slights,disdain

No thought that she could feel real pain

She's such a bore, a klutz, you see

There but for the grace of God goes me

So I never feel sorry for those

Of the much publicised minorities

Who go about in martyr's clothes

Complaining to the authorities

Because my face won't fit with anyone

The misery of facial prejudice

At least for the Jew there's another one

For the black another black to wish

A sharing of the hurt and pain

For I, nonsuch, no none, exist

And looking, I look in vain

Then remember the plot twist

In “Chariots of Fire”

That most companionable film

When a Jewish Harold Abrahams

Explains to a puzzled girl, the hurt

Of the see-through stare, the averted gaze

The sudden hush, on entering a room

The death, by a thousand slights

The hollowness, of friendship's doom

And she, laughing at the absurdity

Of such a wrong-headed, paranoid view

That the world could contain such 'rotters'

Then Harold's frowning countenance

As the waiter served pig's trotters!

 

© Mike Laycock (Silversalt)

 

Done