He slow-sputters back, as his day is reduced,
but she won’t agree his speed is removed,
because it is easier to stride at her pace,
and when she slows to show no grace:
all empathy removed by her barbed remarks,
‘Of course you’re hot in all those layers’;
and he’ll shuffle home, not wanting that bed,
because their marriage is long-slow spent.
I stood outside the cabinet
and Chi Chi was still looking
through dark glass eyes,
as she gorged on bamboo,
in her reduced diorama,
another box – a confined story
for us visitors to feed upon.
We lay spooned,
upstairs, under the duvet
for half an afternoon,
as Ian Macmillan
ran to time
on Radio Four:
The lowered summer sky
dumped an excuse,
an inch in an hour,
and other weather news,
giving us
a lame excuse.
I do not believe
in anything I read,
apart from the stutters
of rhymed poetry:
I will kneel down
to fix the any-things,
I know kneeling’s best done
beneath un-wed kings,
under His patronage,
under His state,
because Royalty commands
us plebs to wait:
Ladies, crowns, patronage
and the fine arts,
we queue in His corridor
to win His blue heart:
I will piss up my shed,
the oak-clad exterior,
and wish to piss
on the Royal posterior:
Believe nothing, son,
instead recall,
your grandfather died,
and your father was a fool:
Dig deep into ancestry,
for a small fee,
there you will find
no royalty.
Mass demonstrations
will fall out of favour,
now we have Facebook,
the friends’ agitator:
Remove your cagoules,
no flasks of cold soup,
we’ll duck into Costa
to rage at YouTube.
His urges worked to remove him
for a month to another place,
to lie with girls in hotel rooms,
face down in their paid-up disgrace:
He breakfasted after lunchtime,
smoking packs of duty free:
the afternoons sweated in bed,
soaked in counterfeit Jack D.
Each night was a dark playground,
of bars, birds, and no time for drouth,
he spat his vestige of manners,
with his foul-spun English mouth:
Then he woke in a concrete room,
dried piss as his cold mattress:
“The sex wasn’t ever that good,
not worth the spunked-up cash”.
We are sat drinking
‘Old Speckled Hen’,
out of cooled tins
in the summer’s cold rain,
we talk of the last house,
a ghost we recalled,
when we each met
the ghost in the hall.
This crumbling man
has let you down,
with shortened pulls
of heavy breaths,
a broken pledge
to set high your crown,
instead, disgraced,
he failed that test:
These rough-made men,
reset as fools,
by that male God,
who knows no shame,
who ‘out of love’
re-shaped their fear,
because of Him
I should lose love’s claims.
