I have always loved you.

I imagine us 30 years down the road.
I am massaging your shoulders,
relieving knots.
Life gets me in knots too.

I've put the kettle on
I have my own key now so I come and go as I please
like the old friend I've become.
I feed your cat when you go away at weekends.

Smelling your pillow
Remembering you at 40.
Your dressing table
as I pictured it.

I have my own family now
but I met you 10 years before I met my wife.
I rode the wave of your smile,
came crashing down
the day you announced you'd met someone,
holding out for the real thing.

For; I was just a boy,
what could I deliver apart from newspapers
and the odd dodgy innuendos? you laughed at
tossing your hair.
Humouring me
but,
Never letting on that you cared.

I slip away every second night
when the second hand rests between the 8 and the 9
and it is quarter to 10.
I am on my way to see you.
We play cards and toast a drink into midnight.
Sometimes I reach for your delicately aged hand
twiddling with your rings,
knowing mine would have been the sparkly one.
But not a patch on you.

We lock eyes for around a minute,
My throat is dry.
Telepathically I tell you
I have always loved you.
Whether you are 45 or 75
I will always love you.

Unlucky the hero born
In this province of the stuck record
Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
And the mayor's rôtisserie turns
Round of its own accord.

There's no career in the venture
Of riding against the lizard,
Himself withered these latter-days
To leaf-size from lack of action:
History's beaten the hazard.

The last crone got burnt up
More than eight decades back
With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
But the children are better for it,
The cow milks cream an inch thick.

Better that every fiber crack
and fury make head,
blood drenching vivid
couch, carpet, floor
and the snake-figured almanac
vouching you are
a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so
under prickling stars,
with stare, with curse
blackening the time
goodbyes were said, trains let go,
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from
my one kingdom.