HYPOMANIA

Why have these balloons 

not popped, that grow so large

and simmer by the ceiling,

pre-empting bust,

like bubbles flirting 

at the surface, threatening

pop? I am in love.

It crackles under duvets like

electric blankets,

spilling sparks into my groin.

I swell like blisters

that grow hard and burst

like fountains that erupt

like beer cans,

shaken to the point of bang,

and tin, exploded, shines

like water falling

into water. Water welling

in the mouth

and water, pooled, tastes salted.

TURING

His beautiful theory was witchcraft; the mind

spun into wires and NAND gates, NOT gates refusing

the tentative feeling of NOR fibreoptics.

This was his dream; love's electricity mapped

on a circuit board. He wanted to love

like a machine could manipulate symbols.

His hands were the same as the hands they met;

in size, in shape. Fingers that interlaced,

shared hairs. The sweat on his brow and eyes.

Something furtive; he never lied,

but kept the secret cracking secret codes.

His 'proclivities' were 'known' among his peers.

He loved and was refused; society redacted

him from history and castrated him chemically,

gave him a record and blanked his achievement.

Broken, oestrogen fat breasts and humiliated;

he took Eve's apple from the wicked queen,
leaving love's splayed cables puthering sparks.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/23526 please sign

4 LITTLE BENS

for BC


The telephone had been telling lies
and made you glum.
I wish Alexander Graham Bell's father had been crushed by a train.
I wish the patent office had shredded the application.
The telephone has been telling lies
and made you glum.


*


Love poems
aren't always about the hottest torsos and the biggest cocks
aren't always about love
are definitely not 
about heartache.


*


I wanted to remember you
like an egg. FRIED!
I wanted to cheer you up
like an egg. SCRAMBLED!
I wanted to surprise you
like an egg. CUSTARD!


*


Nothing happy ever happens
to the unhappy.
Just as frogs never get settled in rain. 
I will love you like spawn
loves the lake and mosquitos.
This is one sticky Spring!

BAD POTATO WEATHER

The nightjars are blacking the sun out
with rainclouds of feather. Poor scratching
in the waterlogged soil for lungworm
and beetle. The potassium's peaking
round mid-afternoon, making sailors afraid
of lithium in spinach barrels. Flood warning
by dawn. This is bad potato weather. The kind
to sink dormice and make millionaires 
of stoats. In ferns, toads burp at frogs spawning
in rivers that burst, coursing new valleys
of acid erosion. Stone turns to leek in the riptides.

GRAPPLING THE DEVIL

We were women in love. The Devil came,

unannounced, through a storm of tobacco and whisky

to fight me. He said he called weeks in advance,

but no telephone had rung in the house for a month.

He stripped himself of his steaming boots and shirt 

in the hall, circled my chair on red wine slicked hooves 

and asked me to dance. We were clumsy at first,

fumbling at each other's torsos. The Devil slipped

through my palms like egg yolks and I rolled

from his reach. Then he got firm, pinched at my waist

and hips like an uncle. His hands were large,

lifted and turned me over his arms and under

his chest. I felt his forked prick swollen in my thigh.

I twisted my wrists in his fists, but his ankles

pinned mine. I was locked in his frame, his shape,

and all his snorting, lusting, spitting sex was in me.

CORRIDORS

These are the doors of the corridors of my inertia.
These are my hands on the doors and the walls
of the corridors; the door handles, loose in my grasp.
These are the corridors behind the doors at the end
of the corridors of my inertia. These are the steps
that carpet the floors of the corridors. This is the down
I am going step by step, door by door. Corridors
after corridors. These are the between spaces
between floors and ceilings, between living and lives,
the corridors which curve like a flume down which one dives.

EVENTS LEADING TO A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

for JA

Once you have recognised the director miscast you

as Atlas in the school production of Fiddler, it is hard

to escape the burden of carrying the entire scenery

around on your back. I was holding billboards slapped

with paint by the Y9's, bits of fence used to disguise

where they'd missed and the MDF shone through.

The subject matter was heavy. Some Russian Jews

had been thrown out of their homes like rocks

chucked in the sea and I had to keep turning this way

and that to be certain the actors said their lines

in the right places. These were my responsibilities

that I shouldered alone. My parents were touring

in productions of Don't Look Back and Les Mis respectively.

I was cutting my teeth in the world of theatre,

though as I grew old I was typecast as Reb Nachum, the beggar

whom nobody listened to, who did not sing or dance,

just said a few lines to keep the whole thing moving.

This was who I was playing when I quit acting.