Someone with the authority to do so
Had tended a toppled bollard
With black bin liner.
The University slope recalled,
Of all places,
Aberystwyth.
Stethoscope antlers peeked
Ostentatiously
Out of white coat pockets.
High-rises everywhere,
As inscrutable as people
You will never see inside.
It jerks and rumbles through the blue,
Hauling night-capped sitters
Over seven time-zones.
They emerge rubbing bleary sun,
Breathing forgotten toothpaste.
Clock hands are all out of whack,
If anything slipping slyly back,
And the taxi red in a breakfast noon.
That night it’s 3am, or 7pm,
Dinner: broccoli, salmon, spaghetti!
The routine buoys him,
The rhythm looses,
And floating on homeward foam,
He departs a nameless jetty.
June rolls around, and I hear them,
Coiling their canisters
In the meadows
And depressions
Left by picnic blankets.
They want to bung me up,
To pepper-spray me until
My eye-water leaves me
Smudged rugged.
They want me to slow choke,
And wake with a stale fur
Like lichen over
Teeth and tongue.
These are your flowers, you poets,
These Husseinist bioarms,
These roses and lilies,
Petunias and daffodils,
Ranked to smear summer
Across the unchallenged face.
The sun did not rise today —
No —
He pounced unannounced,
Shouldering his jealousy
Into the unguarded Earth.
He’d seen, you see,
How she seldom shied
From the lips of the breeze;
H’d noted too
The chiselled moon,
And how he’d come early,
Adorning the blue.
So as long as he might,
He kept his lover in sight,
Stifling her surface
With a cloying love bright.
Her grass he yellowed,
And my skin pinks,
Blushing until, reluctant,
He sinks.
Like ermine in the summertime,
I’ll need you
Six months ago.
Beneath the leafy eaves,
We three:
Me, hayfever-free,
He,
And he,
Within the lee
Of a weeping tree.
We sip its tears
For fear our laughter
Will disturb the day;
And swallow its sighs
To better disguise
The reckless mirth in all we say.
Shorter Poems 