David and Goliath Story
So you, unperturbed,
let me weep on your
marvellous stomach–
hallowed ground,
ribbed by the sleeping mounds
of nested muscles–
and when I am done,
wrung out, washed in,
belly-up on the sand
like a beached jelly,
you gift me a Stanley Hammer:
practical yet elegant,
like me, on a good day
then later, you tail me
from New Cross to Kilburn
in a biblical flood,
you out on your cycle
and I, tracing your lights
from my great, greasy
bus-box, petrified–
a silver-flash sardine
chasing a humpback,
a David and Goliath Story!
you tell me, hero-mode–
but tell me this, tell me how,
of all the faces in the world,
did I align myself to yours?–
noble-nosed, baby-flushed–
a miracle! Pulled up next to mine,
I spy you, Lover,
through the window-fogged—
I took a neat nail
and my Stanley Hammer,
hung that grin up
on my heart’s cushioned wall.
Sticky Lullaby
goodnight my darling
I’m four floors up at Senate House
just drifting off pleasantly
in the room chock-a-block with Chesterfields
rows and rows of them
like dimpled pigs in the abattoir queue
waiting for the making
of a thousand slick little sausages
so goodnight my darling
I’m taking the piglets
and we’re getting out of here
we trot fast in our finest cowboy boots
licking our fuzzy lips
and thrusting our coiled appendages,
and what’s more, we’re dreaming of you
making sticky love to me
at strange, hip-aching angles
in a high sticky barn where the pigs aren’t dead,
just sleeping,
in a puff of apricot hay;
you and I have burnt our bookbags
and grown snouts
so there’s nothing, really,
to be getting on with.
Hag
after Ben Jonson
Thou more then most sweet glove,
Unto my more sweet love,
Suffer me to store with kisses
This empty lodging…
When the rain came I read a book of love poems
I was shrivelled as a hag, and in it there was Jonson
writing his Lady as a white kid glove, so desperate
was he to shove his busy red fingers into her;
but she’ll get holes, I said aloud, in her nice thin leather
she’ll get holes, whilst outside someone bulldozed
someone else’s home, so the bricks above me quivered
and the windows quaked: us next! they cried, but still I rifled
through my sonnets, singing Oh God!
when will I ever learn