Since We’ve Lived Here


Consider me in three second shots
on the edges of every Sicilian quarter,
attend to me even through cramp.
If I had practiced reticence
in the face of wet warm and lucid,
looked sideways as beating muscle taught
in glades of basking, gold-thieving

I would never have. And if
I grew old it was only because I
was cooing the corn down after
the show and did not forget you
dusk, hassled you down too, to the
last damp thread to separate my calf
in the milky goo. Allow me

to descend in a force field around
your fecund head, plush don’t
worry since I fret for the both of us,
Erec & Enide, I spite you in return
and forget my curiosity for the unseen
notebooks and strap my hair in difficult
positions til I cannot go outside, cannot.

Regard me as your honey bee
in primary colours, paint my toes in
shades of your mother’s living room,
revisit your childhood, make me your mother,
like a dove startled out of the cave
in the secret honeycombs of the rock
I came out astonished and awry.

Consider me in your kind of place where
the critical vocabulary belongs to our
castle in the middle distance,
appraise me in a scandalous dressing-down
of rubric and feel me up in the toilets,
a seductive submissive ingénue, and am
I that name.


Three in a Boat


As conjugal as a deep guitar rakes his lawn and gathers
geniality to add like stars to Christmas trees, mister so-and-so
student busker paedophile and such-and-such,
everyone endeared to the lyrics and here for proof –
too true, prove the proof and we are happily.

As happily as a small car strung out in bluebird crochets and frisky
vowels, the street shone from Beautiful’s forehead, he couldn’t
have guessed the wet cobbles were rays of beans and
other enchantments, raw-cheeked and tenuous we
all looped the loop and sailed away

on the pale vanishing point, happily, palacial with ice cream,
turret haircuts, ballot papers in our paws.