[Section 5 of 200 is comprises three short subsections entitled ‘Breakfast’, ‘Dinner’ and ‘Tea’, and a free-standing song entitled ‘Sad Yu’s Mirror Soliloquy’.]

1. Breakfast

Yu’s day begins with a cold shower

and porridge, which is good for the mind.

She jogs through the early morning

fog, barked at by dogs and ogled

by creepy old men. Another cold shower.

What is good for body is also good for mind.

2 Dinner

“Hey, Yu”, someone high-fives her

over their pub carvery Sunday lunch,

gravy bleeding from rare cooked slices of roast beef

into the crevices of chunky amber cuts of boiled swede,

a little pyramid of Brussels sprouts piled up,

a dab of mustard on the side.

“Who was that?” Father snaps.

Yu dumps her cutlery down with a clash

and stomps off

to the partial refuge

of the restroom

in a rage.

Song #1 Sad Yu’s Mirror Soliloquy

They come into the bathroom here

in two by twos

to giggle about boys,

and put graffiti on the walls

and lipstick on their mouths.

They grimace in the mirror

and see themselves revealed.

I look deep in the misted glass

and see no self at all;

only the mirror’s depth and mine,

entwined in an amour.

I put a little razor cut

in an obtruding vein.

I wipe it up immediately

and wash it down the drain.

3. Tea

‘A nice pot of tea, of course,

is what the British recommend for this time of day,’

Da lies back and intones, looking up and saluting the sun

declining leisurely in the bluish white afternoon sky

behind clouds, as if it were a fallen comrade in arms.

“You’re a Mad Hatter, you are Da,”

Yu quips back, dumping her ass down on the bench beside him

and squinting up through thick perspective-challenged eyeglasses

at the shining steeple piercing the sky. “You know that book

about the steeplejack?” she goes on, dribbling. “I never

liked it. Too grim, like. You know what I mean? Too fucking like…

You know… whatever… ‘a loser’ that’s what the guys from round here

would call that guy. You can get off on capitalism, you know, too

Da. It’s OK now. The world has changed.” Da

is slumped back on the bench barely breathing. “Da!”

Yu shrieks likes a whistle, before she is beset by a flock of demons

and wrestled to the ground by a cop, as she tries to shoo

them off like geese with wild waving wings of hands.

She wakes up three months later, bewildered,

in an NHS hospital, nurses offering her tea.