ROCK

You did pillow talk,

keeping your voices low

so the kids couldn't hear

the sex. There was none.

No breaking of your vows

of silence. Doris Day,

marvelling at your straightened pinkie,

was in on the joke.

Nobody heard the sex.

In the darkness and the silvered hush

hands, fumbling under shirts

and projections, find a gasp.

Denim, forced tight, springs open

like a man trap. I have never felt

such excitement. The man in front

says keep it down, but we've come

and it is all over the screen.

THE FAMOUS JOKE

after QC

I don't like peas
and I'm glad I don't like peas
because if I liked them I'd eat them
and I hate peas.

I WAS A GARETH GATES FAN

for JD

I was just like my grandmother,
phoning for both in case either

would lose. She'd told me she'd rung up
eight times, and each time a flip-flop

decision as who was her Pop 
Idol. I plumped for the young pup

who stammered and looked like cute sex,
and voted the once more. My ex

was indifferent and said both my
Nanna and I were insane. Say

what you will about phone votes,
my nan is officially nuts.

She'd gone for Will Young and for Steve
Brookstein on X-Factor. Believe

me, she's crazy but loves choirs
of stutterers as much as queers.

JAMES DRAPER EUROPEAN CINEMA CLUB

for JD

None of the boys in these movies 
are under eighteen in compliance
with European law, and none
of the boys in these movies are over
nineteen, and no-one speaks English,
only Icelandic or Dutch. Everyone
takes all of their clothes off almost
all of the time in these movies, and
nobody gets shy round the thermals
and geysers on those volcanic shores.
Sometimes two of the boys go off
on their own for a talk-scene indoors,
say a beach house or sauna, either
they are clothed, or unclothed, or
unclothing each other as they talk.
None of the boys in these movies
has a bad word to say about the boys
in these movies, and none of the boys
says anything dumb or clever in these
movies, and everyone is always cut
and clean shaven, and no-one is fat,
and no-one is ugly. All of the boys
in these movies do it for pleasure,
nobody gets paid more than the other,
and none have a beautiful wife
back home, or a child to provide for.
Everyone is single and happy and alone.

LAST REFUGE OF THE CRACKPOTS

That tall house on the left, up there,
is where they shut them up; the cracked
and their lolling, jabbering tongues,
talking all the time about their lives,
refusing to perform the simplest routines
like being nice. They shut them up,
with sticky–tape and glue on all the doors
and windows, they couldn't let their thoughts
escape on an unsuspecting public;
the sexually depraved, the rippers and strippers,
the queers, the whippers, jack–booted
women in lumberjack garb, the different, 
the anyones doing anythings to anyothers.
INSERT PENIS HERE! Not just them; the mad,
the almost mad, the angry, the sad,
the disabled, the foreigns, the wogs, the thinkers,
anyone who thought, the drunks. The house was tall
to catch their dreams. At night they had them.
Outside you could hear them shouting
bits of language — Das Kaninchen ist unter
den Fernseher! Die Katze ist auf dem Tisch!
Whackjobs, the lot of them, learning a thing
like that! But, night, it was like the house glowed,
a soft rainbow warming the evening air around it,
spotting celestial bodies through darkness encroaching.
Now they've gone. That tall house on the left,
up there, is where they shut them up.

CHOOKS REVISITED

but he had never expected to live to see 

one hog dressed by several hundred men.

It was like a wonderful poem to him 

and he took it all in guilelessly. — Upton Sinclair

I was immune to the smells. The flesh that came

to me down the line, hand over fist under cleaver,

grew less tender to touch. The meat, hard

in my palms, was difficult to love. I broke bones

down the backs of beasts like breadsticks, snapped

chook necks with my brothers like sharing wives.

We do all that here, under one roof, with knives.

I stopped feeling guilty, was no longer disgusted

by the cannibalised corpses we swapped. The chooks

stripped clean to the bone, minced or diced,

thinning down to the end of their lives 

like the cigars we smoked. We were a machine making death.

I worked overtime, eyes down on the belts, obsessing

over skins, removing the sinews that cooked tough. 

With each chook, I performed automatic routines 

with my fingers and never came up for breath.

TULIPS

These tulips remind me 
of your puckering anus,

flowering,

petals peeling back

to the bee tongue.

We are making honey

in the garden of Gethsemane.

Among the hydrangeas

and clematis,

my suckling mouth brings

pollen to your stamen.

I am your child father

my brother my son

and here I betray you

with my kiss. My fist.

CHOOK

The slaughterhouse set my head pounding:

all those chooks jostling along the disassembly lines.

All the men there who shake hands with corpses.

All the codeine lighting. All the flesh.

I'd never though flesh was grotesque 'til I went there,

'til I saw what men do to chooks with knives.

Yet there was something arousing about it -

The chook chook of the machines? The conveyor belt?

Perhaps. I'd rather it was the men, elbow deep

in chook meat, groping wet innards,

packaging them. The fact they do all that here

under one roof. None go home. None have wives.

I think I began to like the smell of men and meat;

the mechanical nature of work and lines.

I began to want to be a chook, paralysed by light,

manhandled on the belts - torn - reformed - repackaged all night.