She has a kind face and wears glasses with a tortoise-shell coloured rim,
And has a tortoise-shell coloured thing on her lip that could really do with a trim,
Which, when she is thinking, she flicks with the tip of her tongue,
And she says she's only fifty years old, when really she's sixty-one.

In bed she wears a laced corset of patent, red leather,
That concertinas the skin on her chest where it presses her ******* together,
And although she's more than three times my age, she says it isn't a barrier,
And it's not just because she's very rich that I say yes when she asks me to marry her.

Beneath the salvaged chandelier from a great ocean, liner,
I sip Earl Grey tea from the finest, bone china
With a polite little man in half-moon specs
In the warehouse of treasures that he collects:
Of hallmarked silver in glass, display cases,
Porcelain figures with colourless faces,
Pearls, ivory,  pallid pieces of jade,
Diamonds set in a Damascene blade
And before a naked Apollo in snow white stone
Plundered by the Goths from his temple in Rome,
The polite little man in his tidy bow tie
Kisses me on the lips as he
Unzips my fly.

There is always the fire,
Whether in the charcoal sketches
Or the scattered canvases, each shunted off to the side
In various states of incompletion
(He offered little clue as to why each was seemingly abandoned,
As he seemed reasonably content with them
In terms of composition and technique,
Suggesting there was something else that eluded him,
Something he had misapprehended)
An all-encompassing conflagration
Which promised the eventual envelopment
Of all in its path, flesh and façade,
Mortar and muscle,
Yet the assemblage of waiters, telephone operators,
Delivery boys and meter maids
Do not, by and large, exhibit the expected terror;
Oh, it is there now and again,
Mixed in among those who would,
With a certain madness in their gaze,
Exhort the torch-bearers onward,
And there is the odd face who regard the whole undertaking
With an unmistakable glee,
But, by and large, there is a matter-of-factness about the figures,
Varying between grim determination and an utter sang-froid,
And when one of the select few he has showed the preliminaries
Noted how he'd expected the dried brush and ground cover
To burst into flame on a more-or-less daily basis,
He looked up from his pencils and grunted
When it comes, the brush won't have a ******* thing
To do with it.

The 4:00am air smells clear
Fresh like your kisses
It makes me think of home
When Nova Amor comes on
And we watch cars fly by us
The dawn will break soon
And you will need to sneak home
But right now
I live in a dream.

Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
So Dusty Springfield asserted from her knees
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

The flow of passion deepens in fits and starts,
And does not walk the tidy path of our pleas.
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Till-death-do-we-part tortures spinsters and tarts
The rice a mirage, the wedding march a tease.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

It ignores the primacy of graphs and charts,
Choosing its own time and moments to seize;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Love at first sight upsets all our apple carts,
Yet we rush headlong to pick it from the trees.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

One more torch song, then, to rocket up the charts.
One more tear-stained chanteuse to sing the reprise;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)