Last Pick Poem by Tony Jolley

Against the elegant, if ageing, shuttered façades of Old France,
Sweeping their stylish, nineteenth century architecture in voluptuous curves
Along the avenue
Toward the high-glazed garishness of the new concrete city,
The house was an anachronism:
It stuck out like the sort of sore thumb
Only ever to be found on the non-hammer-hand of a carpenter’s first-day apprentice.

Squat;
Square;
Unwanted;
Unwelcome;
Indecent in the insufferably uncompromising rectitude
Of its highly-calculated horizontals and verticals.
It had not learned the lesson
That too much precision
Just offends the vision.

It implored.
It insisted.
It imposed
With all the immaculate symmetry of its walls and windows
And the dead-centre design of its doors.

It failed.

It was the wallflower by the dance-floor,
The suit at the party kitchen sink,
Last ‘pick’ in the playground football team.

It was a house.
It would never be a home.

Sad to say, it seemed to know it.