Vivid teenage girls with awkward boys
jig about and giggle; the little radio bleats.
Everything is poster bright:
Free Condoms, Folic Acid.
You are wearing black as usual;
your black hair, your pale skin.
The salmon-red polyprop chairs sit
like strange plastic organs
from a third-form biology lesson:
And this is the oviduct or Fallopian tube,
and this is the placenta, and this is the vagina.
One girl shows a leaflet to her boy,
'That's the coil, it's for rude boys like you!'
She leans, chuckles; he squirms in his trainers,
they seem to be ceaselessly dancing, these kids.
The white of your skin,
the dark rings under you eyes.
The receptionist ticks off
a row of boxes on a sheet,
'First the nurse, then the doctor,
then the nurse and the doctor together,
then we finish off with the counsellor.'
Your eyes are fixed on nothing,
you are thinking of nothing perhaps
or of what nothing is
and when it stops being nothing.
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