‘Now look, your grace,’ said Sancho, ‘what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.’  Cervantes

Alison tilts at wheelie bins,
and wrestles with restaurants’ 
sandwich boards and chairs.
She screams at no one and everyone
and she scares the tourists 
with their ice creams and churros
all up and down Augusta Avenue.

The drunks and the tweakers who smoke 
and swear outside the community centre
try and look out for her. ‘Quit it, Alison!’
They shout when she gets too much.
Those times she begins to come down.
To lurch and scream and rage
all up and down Augusta Avenue.

Even a marionette has more 
meat on it than Alison, 
scarecrow skinny as she is.
Sometimes I’ll see her slouched 
on a curb, nodding out or
muttering to herself. Head buried
in arms just scar and spindle,  

a still smoking cigarette 
burned down to her cracked 
and bloody knuckles. 
‘She needs a warm bath 
and soft clothes and someone 
to be kind to her,’ my flat mate tells me.
‘She needs to be off the streets,’ she says.

Alison tilts at wheelie bins,
and wrestles with restaurants’
sandwich boards and chairs.
On recycling day she roars extra loud.
You can see the defeated
blue bins lying on their sides,
all up and down Augusta Avenue.