One day a red-haired boy showed up and never went away. 

All males comprised the same degrees of solemnity to me then. 

But this boy was all about schemes and plans, a real gobshite it was said, 

and the gang was desperate 

for new rituals to be brought in. 

The gang, such as it was. 

It certainly wasn’t mine. 

I was a girl and six years younger. 

An interloper whose parents temporarily gave her over. 

I was an adposition left dangling after 

the people who we hang about ____. 

Recently I could’ve been seen under stacks of smoke, silent, 

watching sticks poke one ball into another as men puzzled 

over what a child was doing amongst their ranks. 

And a female child no less. 

A form yet to morph into something to want. 

Unless they really tried. 

The gang had spent the dark days of the dark months in these snooker halls 

tackling the art of geometry. 

I would know what it meant to endure 

by the time I was I told I was mature for my age. 

It was as the days felt like they were being tugged at both ends 

that the red-haired boy entered 

and said Yous are fooking sad bastards, aren’t ya? 

With that we migrated outside. 

We walked through the emerging bog cotton singing 

white American songs of rage. 

It was in his voice that we recognised the red-haired boy’s authority, 

his accent harsher than ours as he talked of his activities: 

leathering – 

the act of violence towards another –  

and being leathered – 

the act of submitting to the violence of intoxication –  

as well as all the waiting women, supplicant 

and obliged to exist for him 

as vessels of self-justification. 

Faced with proximity to a man now I think of how 

I knew then I’d never have what it takes to be a woman. 

Anyway, a soft breeze ruffled the generous overspill of our clothes 

as the sun tried to break the cloud to reveal a pastoral blue over yawning land. 

I reckon I could have anyone in our year or below 

the red-haired boy 

explained between glugs from a can, 

the nature of the possession in have 

as elusive as exactly when the seasons change and the gloom 

becomes enlightened again.