When I was writing my post about fancy notepaper the other week, I couldn’t stop thinking about this poem I wrote in the late 1990s.

It describes exactly the same thing, but with boyfriends.

Metaphorically, that is! Allow me to state for the record that at no time did I in fact make a life-size boyfriend puppet and drag him around the dance floor with me. But the largely unconscious and entirely unexamined urge to make things into something they weren’t, so as to (here it comes again) fit in? Yeah, no, definitely.

I’ve updated my original title to something I dislike a little less, and I’ve tweaked one or two words, but otherwise this is the poem I wrote in my early twenties.

I was trying to capture something I knew was important in my life. At the time, I never made the link with my seven-year-old attempts to fake normality using A4 typing paper and 30 markers, but today, it’s glaringly clear.

Creature

“I need a man,” she said, and set to work,
tapping a childhood flair for arts and crafts—
she gathered scraps: a battered piano stool,
old clothes, the ruins of a basket chair,
even some pots and pans she thought would do

spread them all out in her living-room
and worked for days with tape and string and glue—
did clever things with chicken-wire, fleshed out
the figure with old ravelled socks, and cut,
out of a magazine, a face to die for

and now they’re dancing—yes, it’s worked—at last!
her wild eyes break her tears, her livid smile
grimly denies the lurching, thumping weight
she wields; her clenched and brittle hum drowns out
the quick snap and creak of a wicker heart