Unlike the slow and groaning gloaming,
A creeping darling
Moaning morning
Heavy lashed and lulling
With a shushing fingered longing,
Puts her eyes on, limp and limpid,
And steals through fields of lamb-licked grass.

In the city, roofs are cracking
And the light is soundly whacking
At the windows of the sisters
Sharing bedrooms with their brothers
And sunlight settles on the curtains
Of a girl who is uncertain
Of the boy she’s waking up with
Who is feeling up her ****.

Politeness stops her yawning
On this creeping darling moaning morning.

The mother of Love
Is Quietness,
And
The last thing to leave
Pandora’s box
Was
Hope.

Amber storms are coming –
But not for you and I, my love.
We will sit here in peace
With the windows
And our mouths
And the boxes
All shut.

Dullness comes like rain,
Eyes dull like champagne
Left out in glasses cold,
Like underpolished gold.

Such mollycoddle words
Such words I’ve often heard,
Disguised as strong commands,
With my shoulders meeting hands.

A shooting spree of dreams
On a melancholy green,
I hide him under beds,
And tell the room he’s dead.

Dullness comes like rain,
Like old champagne again,
Paralysed and rolled,
In underpolished gold.

Snatching at the hours,
I point my feet
Like a clock at twelve
And imagine hands.

I’d like to call you,
I’d like to tell you
That I’m thinking about
Walking to the countryside.
I’d like to tell you
That this highness
Doesn’t feel royal,
And that I can’t stop
Thinking
Of beheaded ancestors
And bolt-headed cattle,
Loveable tortures,
Millions of wandering dogs.

I want to call you and
Reel off a list of
Everything that’s ever happened,
All the people in the world
Who have made love at
Deeply
Satisfying
Angles,
I want to call you,
Pump you with blood,
My fingers rabbiting
Through a snug warren -
Bright Eyes,
Bulldozer,

Wanna call you
And say
'How could he do it to me?'
And in the same breath,
'Imagine me on my knees,
Oh, uh,
**** my mouth from
A distance -
But,
But,
How could he do it?'

Wanna call you
Because I’m not happy at all,
The universe is sitting
On my head,

Need to call you,
All ******* in a tangle
Baby,
I know the histories of
All the trees
And I want to pour over maps
Today.

I want to call you,
I've got so many questions.

I’d like to call you
And ask you
Why I’m not dead.
No melodrama,
No pressure,

But I’m gonna really need an answer.

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.

Grey morning,
The newspaper and
The cat.

His lilac eyelids can’t wake up,
Weighed down with
Saturday’s *****,
Pints and pints.

His dark legs,
My white legs,
Mixed up like coffee and cream -
He stirs and coughs and maybe dreams.

How I love Sundays,
Quiet and warm
With the newspaper,
The cat,
And him.

Table,

My father and I sat
In our timeless silence
That brewed away beneath the lights
Like a sweat that never breaks.

Sister and the Stranger
Sat flanked by pillars,
With two full glasses of
Blood-lit wine
Simmering warmly like
Lamb's hearts
Dropped into bowls.

Never do I love my sister more
That when she wears that little fishhook
Of a smile,
A grim refusal of her lips to flicker down,
Making mincemeat of photographers,
Men in bad jumpers,
And garrulous psychopaths.
It was crueler than any frown.
Far more efficient.

The Stranger buttered her bread-roll all at once,
(A damning thing to do this afternoon)
And dinner turned to coffee
Without a hitch.
I noticed that the whole evening was
Done in a deliberately cut-glass way -
Two siblings painting themselves
Into the people they never wanted to be,
To make a ******-minded point.

She’s not one of us.
She’s nothing like us.
She’s nothing like mother -
Absolutely nothing like mother!

And as we stood waiting for the car
My sister turned to me and said –
“I thought my expectations of daddy were low.”
She swiped at her flapper-girl haircut,
“Turns out my expectations
Have a basement.”

We only notice class
When we need to shut someone
Out.
We only notice class

When it's all we've got.