Gone Fishin'

I am fallow. I need to take a break for a month or so. Best fishes to you all xxx

On being sexually harassed by poetry

OK then yes
I said
Reading the auguries
In my gusset
Watching white wine
Turn to red
In my glass
OK then yes
I will let you in

I’ll take off my tracksuit
Unlace my trainers
And put on your rings
And your shrouds

I’ll eat your damn figs
And lap the honey
And the salt
From your palm

And in the bat time
I’ll feed myself
Back slim enough
To fit between your lines

You have been patient
These afternoons

So yes, then

OK then yes

A Local Magazine for Local People

Once a month the free magazine drops through the letterbox to brighten my day. It advertises hundreds of local businesses, from lawyers and psychics to dog-groomers and plumbers. There are notifications of jumble sales and art society meetings and a speech at the Methodist Church on ‘Collecting Old Documents’. There’s a reasonably challenging wordsearch. The best bits, though, are the readers’ letters. Only three people ever write to the free magazine – Colin, Ian and Marjorie. I would like to share their letters from this month’s edition, exactly as published.

Dear all

Thank goodness for the door step delivery “My Milkman”. I have always known a milkman from a child in the family home to the present day, 76 years. I always think: - “If I can’t get out and about I can rely on milk, eggs, potatoes etc.” Long may they continue.

Marjorie.


Dear Sharon and Mary

Bet the kids had fun and games in the school holidays with the duck pleasing weather. Speaking of games a strange one I recently came across is called Knur and Spell. What is it? Well it’s a game played mostly in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. The Knur is the ½ oz diameter ball the Spell is the trap fixed to the ground. The ball is then released by a trigger and is struck by a player with a wooden hammer or pommel. The longest drive on record is 314 yards.

Colin


And Ian, apropos of fuck all, has sent in a long letter all about the eruption of Krakatoa.

The Cat Crept In

I dreamt about the cat with the human face again. It was eating pork scratchings at the foot of my bed and thrumming like a hot machine. It crawled up the length of my sheet-swaddled self and rested its head upon my breast. A low song it sang to me, unrhymed and sepulchral, and it tenderised my body with its kneading paws of thorns.

I’ve got to stop eating cat food before I go to sleep.

The Breakfast Man

He comes on Sunday mornings
To my sleep-syrup bed
With softboiled starling eggs
Cupped in his palms.
He balms my lips
With bacon fat
And spreads me soft
Like butter
As he slides the still-warm eggs inside
And turns to sausage
In my mouth

The Passion of the Posset

My passion died when I was salt, Alice-deep in tears. It was only young but it was warped, grown to the shape of its secret box, its tender bits rubbed to leather. It was wipe-clean and it frequented bars, drank pink drinks through straws and flashed its stocking-tops. It brought me out in a rash but it was hungry and it was strong. Then its batteries went flat and its sequins fell off one by one and clogged the hoover for weeks and it died runtish, bald and exposed. Oh it was cheap and oh it did not fit and it bit and it chafed but it was mine, I made it from things I found in bushes and oh I miss it so.

Now I need to grow a new one, well-fitting as fur, moulded to shape like witches’ wax. I need the taste again, the marzipan toad squatted melting on my tongue, the waves of brine and honey. I’ll have to bury clams at midnight outside the adult bookshop, eat nothing but popping candy and bathe in condensed milk. And then somewhere in the oubliettes inside, a poppet will stir, open its mouth and make a sound like herons.

Consummatum Est

It is finished. My murderer crosses her hands over her chest and falls backwards into my arms. I dip her down beneath the surface of me, under my waters in an endless baptism. We are spent.

My desk is mulch, a year’s worth of toast crusts and furry cups, ashtrays and dandruff, impotent ink pens and notes-to-self, empty baggies and Lucozade bottles, unfilled-in forms and fermented fruit and teetering pagodas of splay-spined books.

I should arm myself with bin-bags and Mr Muscle and clean it all away. I should use the special nozzle on the vacuum cleaner and get into all the nooks and crannies, suck away the ash and the dust, the shed skin and the spilled words. I should scrub and swab and straighten and polish and make it all spick-and-span.

Instead I am going to take to my bed with wine and weed and bonbons and poetry and I’m not getting up until Monday.