When I started wearing trousers

In the back of the bus
I played back the memory of her cream slope shoulders,
the rowdy boys from my class squealing about sex with such ease
before the years had had their chance to punch insecurity into every pocket of their minds and skins. Their salivating laughs
sweetly unaware that the porn that titillated them now
would mock them years later,
alone, empty,
and lubricated with tears in a dismal basement flat in east London. The year was 2004;
we were old enough now, and had seen enough now,
to know that the world was turning to shit;
it was every man for himself
and each man for his own dick.
And I, my dreamy eyes starlit
by a curving helix in the limelight. A bowl of fantasies of her in that
dress of confident seduction draped amongst her professional suit
in amongst the jackals of the back of the bus
and their loud visions of loveless sexual machinery. One voice
mentioned her name, and in horror
I heard the undressing male chorus grab her from me
and present her centre stage
in the stale bus atmosphere. Hands to my ears they
stripped her like a knife slicing the bark from a tree,
her dignity
bubbling from their lips in foam-like spit
as they fucked her in the theatre of our collective minds. I rang the bell
I just need to get out
I just need to get out, I thought.
On the walk home
I tried to console her in my mind,
apologise, anything,
when really
I was consoling myself, apologising
for a world I knew I would always have to walk in. Down the alley by the pub
a puffing stalwart from the bar caught my eye, and I watched in dread as his
eyes dribbled down me
and tried to tuck up my skirt. In the
dirty streets of city suburbs I ran, and
I don't think it was long after that I insisted on wearing trousers.
If only to keep my skin, some part of me,
free
from the filth of a war I could not win.