A Poor Boy's Bagatelle Poem by Ken e Hall

My birthday heralds my first decade of life
The air I breathe clings frozen like an insulting knife,
Icing the inside of the old snow white window panes,
The bed bugs do not stir snug under the iron bed frames,
Fattened in the still of the night by the handy supermarket of me,
I awake, my outside world not a single tree.
The winter’s dawn hurls her strength at the gates,
Of the batteries of terrace homes rattling slates,
Felling chimney pots, as the north wind doth blow,
Coating the cobblestones with sleets of snow.
I move the orange box my makeshift bedside table,
To exit the tiny bedroom, fly down the wooden steps quite able,
Still dark I pull the gas lamp chain and with match I strike,
A warm glow brings the only room old fashioned light.
On top a silk red scarf mum’s card sits
She knows my wish my teeth do grit
With no man of house three shillings hard to find,
But poverties life can sometimes be kind,
I pull the scarf off this oblong thing then well,
There it was this old well worn beautiful bagatelle.,
A few nails a miss with a shiny steel ball,
Some numbers askew where it would fall,
In lifetimes hindsight this was my plasma TV,
My i pod, computer, and mobile phone rolled into one.
I felt the luckiest boy under the sun,
I knew I could really really tell,
I would always love this wonder bagatelle,

What luck to live next door to old ‘Ned’ the ‘Rag an bone man’,
Who found my beautiful bagatelle and loaded it onto his
Wheeler dealer of a pram.








PS. A true memory from a page of my childhood