A wicket-keeper, I’d whip off your bails
If I were a wok I’d stir-fry you
A Guardian Angel, be there by you
If I were a glass-blower I’d blow you a kiss
If I were a poem, I’d end up like this.
As Every Bandage Dreams
As every bandage dreams
of being the Shroud of Turin
So do I dream
of enfolding you
As every aria longs
for Pavarotti’s velvet tongue
So my body yearns
to interpret you
As every avalanche schemes
the ascent of Everest
So I aspire
to the view from your summit
As every oilslick licks its lips
at the thought of the Galapagos
So I long to stick around
and pound your beaches
As everything that is without feeling
Comes to life when put next to you
So do I.
Romantic
I’m a romantic.
I often want to bring you flowers
Leave notes under the pillow.
Billets doux. Fivers.
I’m a romantic.
Many’s the time I’ve nearly bought
the unexpected gift.
Chocolates. Diamonds.
I’m a romantic.
How often do I think
of surprising you at the sink.
Pulling the wool over your eyes.
I’m a romantic.
Love on the lino: soapy chocolates,
Diamonds, crushed flowers, fivers,
Billets doux. Wool.
(Little packet, two-thirds full.)
Your Favourite Hat
Believe me when I tell you that
I long to be your favourite hat
The velvet one. Purply-black
With ribbons trailing at the back
The one you wear to parties, plays,
Assignations on red-letter days
Like a bat in your unlit hall
I’d hang until there came the call
To freedom. To hug your crown
As you set off through Camden Town
To run my fingers through your hair
Unbeknown in Chalcot Square
To let them linger, let them trace
My shadow cast upon your face
Until, on reaching the appointed place
(The pulse at your temple, feel it race!)
Breathless, you whisper: ‘At last, at last.’
And once inside, aside I’m cast
There to remain as tick ticks by
Nap rising at each moan and sigh
Ecstatic, curling at the brim
To watch you naked, there with him
Until, too soon, the afternoon gone
You retrieve me, push me on
Then take your leave (as ever, in haste)
Me eager to devour the taste
Of your hair. Your temples now on fire
My tongue, the hatband as you perspire
To savour the dampness of your skin
As you window-gaze. Looking in
But not seeing. Over Primrose Hill
You dawdle, relaxed now, until
Home Sweet Home, where, safely back
Sighing, you impale me on the rack
Is it in spite or because of that
I long to be your favourite hat?
Today is Not a Day for Adultery
Today is not a day for adultery.
The sky is a wet blanket
Being shaken in anger. Thunder
Rumbles through the streets
Like malicious gossip.
Take my advice: braving
The storm will not impress your lover
When you turn up at the house
In an anorak. Wellingtons,
Even coloured, seldom arouse.
Your umbrella will leave a tell-tale
Puddle in the hall. Another stain
To be explained away. Stay in,
Keep your mucus to yourself.
Today is not a day for sin.
Best pick up the phone and cancel.
Postpone until the weather clears.
No point in getting soaked through.
At your age, a fuck’s not worth
The chance of catching ’flu.
Fits and Starts
His love life is one of fits and starts
Claims he works as ‘something in the City’
(partly true, he works at Marks & Sparks)
Engaged once to a student nurse at Bart’s
Who broke it off (‘He’s sad, a sort of Walter Mitty’)
His love life is one of fits and starts
Twice a week he goes with dodgy tarts
Half his wages on the nitty-gritty
(though not, it must be said, at Marks & Sparks)
Life can be the pits, and it’s a pity
To distil one little life into a ditty.
On your marks: his love life is one of
Fits and starts – If it fits, it starts.
The Map
Wandering lost and lonely in Bologna
I found a street-map on the piazza.
Unfortunately, it was of Verona.
As I was refolding it into a limp concertina,
A voice: ‘Ah, you’ve found it! I’m Fiona,
Let me buy you a spritzer, over there on the terrazza.’
Two spritzers later we ordered some pasta
(Bolognese, of course, then zabaglione).
I felt no remorse, merely amore.
Proposing a toast to love at first sight
We laughed and talked over a carafe of chianti
When out of the night, like a ghost, walked my aunty.
‘Look who’s here,’ she cried. ‘If it isn’t our Tony,
Fancy bumping into you in Italy,
With a lady friend too,’ then added, bitterly:
‘How are Lynda and the kids? I’m sure they’re OK.
While the mice are at home the tomcat will play.’
A nod to Fiona, ‘Nice to meet you. Ciao!’
I snapped my grissini. ‘Stupid old cow!’
Then turned to Fiona. She was no longer there.
Our romance in tatters, like the map on her chair.
Whoops!
You are strangely excited
as we enter the crowded bar
and find a small table in the corner.
You insist on fetching the drinks
and before disappearing
squeeze a note into my hand.
It reads: ‘Why go home tonight?
I have a room. I have a bed.
I have a spare toothbrush.’
I recognize my own handwriting.
Dialectically Opposed
In Bristol, to escape the drizzle
One November afternoon, I ventured
Into a large book shop, George’s,
Opposite the university where I was
To read that same evening.
It was my custom in those days
To sniff out my slim volumes
And give them due prominence.
Covers outfacing, three or four titles
Would see off most of the opposition.
But on this occasion, try as I might
(and I might have tried harder),
I could find no poetry whatsoever.
Then I spotted the Information Desk
Behind which was a girl with large bristols.
(I mention this, not to be sexist
But to remind you of that fair city.)
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Do you have
a Poetry Section?’ Rose-Marie replied:
‘I think you’ll find it under Livestock.’
I stood, quandried to the spot.
‘Livestock? Poetry? Books of Verse?’
The penny dropped.
I watched its descent
Into the perfumed gorge of Avon.
‘Poeltry,’ she laughed. ‘I thought you said Poultry!’
Bath – Avon
I have a problem with Bath.
I use the short a, rhyming it with math,
Whereas southerners put in the r. Barth.
So my living there would be a kind of hell
(Although a lovely place by all accounts).
Never have an operation you cannot spell
Or live in a town you mispronounce.
The Examination
‘Well doctor, what do you think?’
He took the poem and examined it.
‘Mmmm…’
The clock ticked nervously.
‘This will have to come out for a start.’
He stabbed a cold finger into its heart.
‘Needs cutting here as well.
This can go.
And this is weak. Needs building up.’
He paused…
‘But it’s the Caesura I’m afraid,
Can’t do much about that.’
My palms sweated.
‘Throw it away and start again, that’s my advice.
And on the way out, send in the next patient, will you?’
I buttoned up my manuscript and left.
Outside, it was raining odes and stanzas.
I caught a crowded anthology and went directly home.
Realizing finally that I would never be published.
That I was to remain one of the alltime great unknown poets,
My work rejected by even the vanity presses,
I decided to end it all.
Taking an overdose of Lyricism
I awaited the final peace
When into the room burst the Verse Squad
Followed by the Poetry Police.
The Poet Takes an Autumnal Stroll on Hampstead Heath
Light rain, like steam
from a cup of camomile tea
poured from a copper kettle
heated o’er a sandalwood fire
bids him return home
and consider an alternative career.
Creative Writing
Why can’t I teach Creative Writing in Minnesota?
Or, better still, be Poet in Residence in Santa Fe?
Where golden-limbed girls with a full quota
Of perfect teeth lionize me, feed me, lead me astray.
A professorship, perhaps, visiting in Ann Arbor?
(Nothing too strenuous, the occasional social call.)
What postcards I can write, what ambitions I can harbour:
Hawaii in the springtime, Harvard in the fall.
Meeting the Poet at Victoria Station
A day off for you to recover from jetlag
and then the tour begins in Brighton.
Neither met nor talked, but I like your poems
and the face on the back of your Selected.
No sign of you under the station clock
nor at the ticket office, so I make my way
to platform 12. Do I hear castanets?
Tap dancers busking for the pure fun of it?
No. Sitting on the floor, back to the wall
surrounded by bags, books and foolscap,
a woman is pounding a typewriter, oblivious
of commuters stepping around and over her.
You are dressed all in black, wearing glasses,
and your hair is wilder than in the photograph.
Not too late for me to turn back and ring
the Arts Council: ‘Laryngitis’… ‘Gingivitis’… ‘St Vitus’
Instead, I ask you to dance. You give me your hand
and I whisk you across the marble floor,
my arm around your waist in the old-fashioned way.
Waltz, Foxtrot, Villanelle, Quickstep.
Ticket inspectors clear the way for us
as I guide you in and out of Knickerbox.
Shoppers stop and applaud as we twirl
around the shelves of W. H. Smith and Boots.
A Tango so erotic that Victoria blushes.
Rush hour but nobody is going anywhere
except in a centipedic circle as we lead
the customers in a Conga round the concourse.
A voice over the tannoy: ‘Take your partners…’
Rumba, Samba, Salsa, Sestina.
Things are hotting up as the tempo quickens
Charleston, Terza Rima, Cha Cha Cha.
Suddenly the music stops.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘are you the poet?’
Removing her glasses she looks up from the typewriter.
‘How did you guess?’ I help carry her bags to the train.
Blazing fruit
(or The Role of the Poet as Entertainer)
During dinner the table caught fire.
No one alluded to the fact
and we ate on, regardless of
the flames singeing our conversation.
Unaware of the smoke
and the butlers swooning,
topics ranged from Auden
concentration however, and being
short on etiquette, became tense
and began to fidget with the melting cutlery.
I was fashioning a spoon
into a question mark
when the Chablis began to steam
and bubble. I stood up,
mumbled something about having left the gas running
and fled blushing
across the plush terrain of the carpet.
The tut-tut-tutting could be heard above
the cra-cra-cracking of the bone china.
Outside, I caught a cab
to the nearest bus stop.
While, back at the table,
they were toying with blazing fruit
and discussing the Role of the Poet as Entertainer,
when the roof fell in.
Take a poem, Miss Smith
‘Take a poem, Miss Smith.
I will call it The Ploughman.
“The ploughman wearily follows the plough,
The dust that lies upon his brow,
Gnarled as the dead oak tree bough,
Makes me think of how… of how…”
How nice you smell, Miss Smith.
Is it Chanel? I thought so.
But to work: “The ploughman wearily follows…”
Ah, but I am wearied of ploughing.
File it away under “Nature – unfinished”.
‘Take a poem, Miss Smith.
It is entitled Belfast.
“Along the Shankhill Road, a pall
Of smoke hangs, thick as… thick as…”
Hair, something different about the hair.
A new style? It suits you.
But where was I? Oh yes:
“Along the Shankhill Road…”
No, I feel unpolitical today.
Put it away in the file
marked “Wars – unfinished”.
‘Take a poem, Miss Smith.
It will be known as Flesh.
“The flesh I love to touch
Is soft as… soft as…”
Take off your blouse, Miss Smith,
I feel a love poem coming on…’
An Ordinary Poetry Reading
Tonight will be an ordinary poetry reading
A run-of-the-mill kind of affair
Nothing that will offend or challenge
No language as far as I’m aware.
The poets are thoroughly decent
All vetted by our committee
We had hoped Wendy Cope might appear
But she’s tied up more’s the pity.
And that other one, whose name I forget…
Quite famous… Recently died…
He’d have been good. But never mind,
At least we can say that we tried.
Personally, I prefer
actors
Reading the Great Works of the Past
The trouble with poets is they mumble
Get nervous, and then speaktoofast.
And alcohol is a danger
So that’s been kept well out of sight
As long as they’re sober this evening
They can drink themselves legless all night.
By the way, they’ve come armed with slim volumes
Which of course, they’re desperate to sell
Otherwise, there’s coffee in the foyer
With KitKats and Hobnobs as well.
Well, I think that covers everything
All that remains for me to say
Is to wish you… an ordinary evening
Such a pity I’m unable to stay.
After the Reading
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
said the lady in fur coat and trainers,
holding out a book for me to sign.
‘Do you mind if I sit down, I’m all of a tizzy?
You must excuse me, I haven’t been myself
since it happened. Three weeks ago and I’m still shaking.
I was walking down the road minding nobody’s
business but my own, when, suddenly,
it leaped out at me. There was no escape.
My back to the railings. Straight out of Hitchcock
it was. A nightmare. I fought to protect myself