10 DECEMBER 1988, Page 38

For You

You, infesters of the street's entrails — scavengers pouncing on guttered fagends, buskers praying for silver hats, schizoid half-breeds, sorry dogs, aimless targets, breathing trash, albinos, winos, wimps, wrecks — you, in the land of howling plenty and heartless lack, under the hardfaced nudge of neon, the strident shadows and wishbone lamps, for you this spare crypt of a poem — long as the grave you can't pay for yet have to take — with my hope that before the redsmocked dustman tip tomorrow into his rancid bin my helpless eye, this poem's finger somehow work for you, have others look, find you a second birthright, kinder life. Geoffrey Holloway