peerage Poem by Joanne Burns

his body a paradigm
of tattoo husbandry he
glowers on the street dreaming
himself to be an award
winning website hawks
the phlegm of his
rhetoric towards the ground
as he poises like some
ancestral reflex to peer
into a bookshop window
jeering as if it's a
vitrine in a fusty museum
till he sees a picture
on a cover looking like
himself with a front
tooth missing so he
fists himself through
then wanders along to
an internet café
where it's hotmail
time his night
vision goggles strapped
to a hip