Episode 222: Scum!

Today, I was finally the victim of racism. Some guys drove by in a car with the windows rolled down, and yelled 'Scum!' at me. I'll admit to being startled, simply because the abuse came out of nowhere. I was just walking back from Tesco after getting some food, minding my own business. So it's taken seven months, but it's happened after all. It says something about me, doesn't it, that my first reaction after the initial shock was to think of writing a poem about it. Am slowly building up the portfolio, and I'm not above culling some of my older work and including it, in what probably amount to literary self-cannibalism. Reading over what I wrote in the past though, it's struck me how self-consciously 'poetic' I tried to be at times, and also my tendency to have epigraphs that sound more meaningful than the actual poem. I still think that 'Another Night On The Patio' was really a breakthrough of sorts for me, since it showed me it was possible to marry strong imagery to flexible syntax and get a good poem out of it. So will have to be quite sparing in what I include from my older work. Have picked out three so far, and that's likely to be all, though I wouldn't rule out taking specific lines from elsewhere and spinning something brand new out of them.