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Tell me what your secret is, how do you do it?
Involuntarily isolated for over fifteen years
yet each new year, for several months,
you dress to impress.
Everyone here knows you, but you walk apart.
Slowly and with a theatre of dignity you pass
in silence, for most months of every year —
but you can scream.
Sometimes you do not visit us for days
then appear, at our glazed front door,
staring in with your arrogant frustration
at the lack of service.
Who else feeds you? I hear, admittedly allegedly,
of sausage rolls and pork pies, and rum soaked raisins
that were meant to subdue then trap you,
but you looked for more.
Now I am caged, to avoid a threatening virus,
self-isolating is the term, twelve weeks the period.
Teach me that self-containment you possess
Percy, ancient village Peacock.
