Your name
Snowballed once inside my brain
And was gone –
(I don't know the Russian for 'one' or 'two'
But for a minute I knew the Russian for you)

So go spend my winnings on the days you've lost,
Your blind-eyed perfect smile is worth the cost,
Good fortune means more to me than luck
But don't sit so close, love,
My poker face is ******.

(You were so good,
Your taste went on for days as no taste should)

One day soon I'll recall your name,

Where I'm from
All the snow melts in the rain

He takes his shirt off without
unbuttoning
and in the dead of night
when he goes for a ****
I see his silhouette
and think -
what a marvellous man.

We row a lot these days
and he is often cross
with the way I never clean the bath,
with the way I move,
and sometimes
with what I eat in bed -

I know I'll never be
the heartless soldier he knew before
or the gym bunny with two iron eyes,
He'll never be quite as blond
as I want,
nor quite as odd.

But still I look at his silhouette
dark and strange
when he goes for a ****,
and I think,
dear me,
what a marvellous man.

no

of course  not

a disease is a disorder
with symptoms and signs
an internal dysfunction
a...
disturbance
in the design

No
I am not infectious -
I touch this boy so,
and see!
He is still a normality
A ******* fiend
An hourglasss devotee -

I am not foodborne, no,
Unless you count
the macaroons
pistachio green
and lemon too,
what a taste
of boyhood,
schoolboy blue

I am not acute,
a one-time sneeze.
I am not
a short-lived
Green coughed
wheeze,

I am not
the plunger in your vaccines -

I am the pistol red and glitter
in your
genes

Liquorice fellows,
Hooded
Execution -
A glossy black
Etonian intrusion,
Settling walnuts
Cracked apart and clever,
Snap crack
Snap, crack,
and
black
forever

Caterwauling rats
All brown and nasty
Sprouting tumours
Buck teeth
Rhinoplasty,
Stealing eggs and dragged on backs
of tumours,
Hissing soft through yellow teeth
'consumers'

Rabbits silver
Lands of plenty green,
All green and plenty
Land of ours, unseen,
Rats and crows
Pick our country bare,
God help the rabbit,
God
God help the hare.

Let me indulge you, and tell you the only story than I can ever tell.

Last night, I dreamt of our pub. It was as gold and black as a caviar tin, a short walk away from school, aching with sun and ready with my pint of London Pride. The grubby green booth kissed your cricket whites and you were seventeen forever, seventeen and as blonde as a mothered statue of a prince, bone-idle, as blonde and as young as dreams can make you.

“Jesus died, for somebody’s sins…”

My hands were sweating around the pint glass and I could feel the promise of a **** in the air,  a good **** in some pink carpeted upstairs room in that ****** little pub from ten years ago where they played old music over tin speakers, where my youth dribbled **** into the flowerpots, where you and I had our first shut-eyed kiss in front of all of our friends and they never said a word about it, not one word.

“…But not mine.”

I fell in love with you in this pub where all I wanted to do was love you, touch you, tell you that you were the most amazingly screwable piece of **** this side of the Milky Way, when just your wayward finger could give me the hardon of my life – and in this dream, darling, you were as real as you ever were, as gold and compact as a star, pink crowned and already wet and I took you between my lips to soak you



G

L

O

R

IIIII

A



I dreamt of the whole length of you inside my throat, with my body so young and beautiful, and you coated me in your own saliva covertly, always hiding the things that I most desperately wanted to see -
batting my head and my hands away...

(Come on - let me see,
le us both be suspended in your spit,
insects caught in the molten gold, gold -)

“Jesus, died, for somebody’s sins…

But not mine.”

……….

In a Bluebird toffee tin
Are a hundred letters –
Most of them doodle-stamped and
Delivered by hand.
Unlike the letters I sent to you
They do not smell of spritzed cologne,
(A trick that I learned from Grease)
They are not messy
Or tea stained,
But perfect powder blue
And allowing for small extravagances –
The Cursive of the Obsessive,
Cursed by neatness and perfect hearts.

I pick one out at random,
A casually cruel one sent from Rome –
I imagine you blinking on a balcony
With dazzles on your collarbone,
A teeny tiny sugarless coffee
At your side,
And a pen tapping your knee.

“I’m not a **** at all –“ you wrote,
"It’s only that you are gregarious
In the most DISGUSTING way.
That’s your problem not mine -
Your optimism won’t catch you.
(Cynicism won’t catch you either,
But it has the courtesy not to throw you.)
I’m stopping now,
By the time you get this
I’ll be back home.
What pointlessness we endure for one other.
I miss you, as you say,
‘ever so’ –
Bedtime here is a source of misery.”

And then you signed your name,
Tiny,
Small,
Impossibly graceful,
Just like yourself.

You were always nasty
When you missed me.

the thorns that cross my mind at night
with gold eggs stuck in my throat
(cod liver oil, big and bloated and gold)

he heaves me into a cold front,
but I can hear planes circling us
on their fronts and cold,
the dark is a rumble
tottering ***** plates on edge

the planets are spectators come too close
like wasps, too close, can't finish this thought -
I love you but I need to be alone,
this is when ghosts come, too shy for you,
they need to sit and shyly shiver,
go now, go out,
and find out -
where is that plane going? Cold, someplace cold?