If you were to author another life,
would you rather be John Doe
or Wulfric Shufflebotham?
Either way, neither would save you
from being sold as an enormous quantity
of quotidian reportage.
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The etymology of first love
You too believed in the heavens’ embroidered cloths
and that a bouquet of dandelions stains just your hands,
even if it’s already past midnight and your posh vocabulary
feels like a string quartet playing to the chomping down on a steak,
and the rough fabric is chafing your neck in order for you to amount
to more than the omission apostrophe in a shy ‘scuse me, please,
you will remember for the next four decades as the redhead with freckles
you’ve never had the chance to meet; just saw her once from a distance,
still too young to matter—a half-crown and a day off worth a stanza
or at least an enjambment.
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Relative values
I went to Poundland the other day,
full of contraptions made in China,
and a thought struck me: if back in the day
a one-pound coin—called a sovereign—
had found its way into Tommy More’s pocket,
could he have bought a Ming celadon for mammy,
not just a hex key set for himself?
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Agent provocateur
I masturbate before going to sleep—
such a perfectly unremarkable statement,
and yet it would evoke a look of bewilderment,
embarrassment even, were I to say it outright,
unlike mentioning that I brush my teeth after every meal
or leisurely read The Diary of Samuel Pepys
at lunchtime.
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The cacoëthes
I envy those who venture forth
into the seagulls’ hunting ground—
also known as the Morrisons car park—
with a Chicken Caesar Wrap
or a sausage roll in their hands, as if they knew
that nociception is not the pain
of appetitions I only know
from a thesaurus.
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The three-ply opulence
I filled the cabinet above the toilet
with rows of loo rolls—three-ply,
enriched with lotion and fragrance;
it is the perfect elegant paper,
or at least that’s what the description
on the back of the packaging says.
Quite the frippery for a derrière—
even one as fine as a poet’s.
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The quotidian
I’ve never been good at living;
with every letter—a hostage to schedule,
too petty for heroic self-restraint,
too indolent to be determined about anything—
I wonder what’s better: to share a rib
or bad breath in a rented flat, so refreshingly inhospitable,
like one of those polite expressions we use
when depicting a whore in a yellow poncho
who happens to be the only one who knows
that promiscuity wears sweat like a coat of arms
and ‘no’ is not the same as ‘I don’t think so’,
leaving me with Keats and table tennis as the Last Rites
or another Tuesday.
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Perception
I like mashed neeps and tatties
and odd locutions—the otiose pursuits
of an idle mind in the age of Catullus—
yet, a creature of modest means,
the day I discovered the fear of ignorance,
I asked, ‘What if we no longer try
making our utterances perspicuous to ourselves?’—
fully aware that I can’t quite see the difference
between a rose and a cauliflower.
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One can only slide between pitches
Anger is not the offspring of circumstance;
it is born out of unsolicited existence
in a panopticon, where we are free
to role-play yesterday with a descant dawn—
for the sake of tomorrow that never quite happens
in the realm of phonetic empathy and burnt dinners
triggering the fire alarm in the tenement every other day.
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