the shop assistant’s home number
scribbled on the back of the receipt.
You, with your mouth so closed,
it’s a buttonhole beneath your nose.
The Doll
I woke up with my arm round my wife,
the clock somewhere between four and five,
slipped out of bed and dressed in the dark.
Paused for the rhythm of her breathing,
quick-quick-slow across the landing,
muffled the door, set off for the park,
where night had turned off all the colours –
grey-black grass and grey-black flowers.
The swings took the piss out of the gallows
and the climbing frame held up the sky.
No child swung and no child climbed.
I found her stretched beneath the willows:
about the size of a healthy baby,
dress somewhere between a sneeze and a hankie,
here-and-now lips and elsewhere eyes.
Each cheek was red as a stop sign,
on her wood wood face on wood wood bones.
Who could have left her here? Who could have known?
In the crook of my arm I carried her home,
as dawn painted its watercolour,
made a sundial of each street light.
Before I got back I’d have to drop her
and never never make mention of her,
or of the reasons I walk out at night.
Decree Nisi
Kelly, this week I’ve filled the house with strange men:
the plumbers and plasterers, the ‘leccies and lackeys,
the lofty young shifters and shifty old lifters,
the chippies and butties, the world and his mate.
The cash-in-hand, the big white van
blocking natural light to the living room.
The painters in white overalls, the strip
they wear when drinking tea for England.
Kelly, this week I’ve filled the house with strange things.
Stepladders and handshakes, buckets with holes in:
I make a wish and throw the hourly rate in.
The settee’s on the lawn, a madman’s garden swing,
paintbrushes take up leg room in the sock drawer
and a hammer sneaks in with the knives and forks.
A photo of your mother’s face down in the toilet;
dustsheets make ghosts of the tables and sideboard.
At ten to five they call it a day,
promise to be here bright and early.
I abracadabra the TV from under our old bedsheet,
settle down to a plate of leftover digestives.
It’s then, Kel,
when the stars come out in the curtainless windows
and the telly echoes through my home.
It’s then I say your name.
Jack-in-the-Box
Just when I think I’ve forgotten you,
they play that song on the radio,
or, sorting through junk, I come across photos:
you’ve sprung up again,
with your made-up grin, your stupid little hat.
With a school compass I gouge and scrape,
give you a Hitler moustache, a Glasgow smile,
then shut you up, lock you in.
As I’m fiddling with the matches,
you bounce up, prettier than ever.
I try the doll with long blonde hair,
who’ll never give me the silent treatment
so long as I pull that string in her back.
But she doesn’t have your spiral-staircase neck,
your irrepressible energy.
I snap and show up at your door.
You invite me in for coffee.
In the living room, there’s a box, about my size:
you place a hand on my head,
push down against my suddenly springy legs.
The Bloke in the Coffee Shop
is a bloke and where he is is yes, you know,
a coffee shop. The bloke in the coffee shop
is what he is; he has in front of him
a coffee and his problems. She’s late again,
he thinks, although he doesn’t have a watch
and it is now, precisely. This bloke has
problems, yes, but let’s forget all that:
today is Saturday and not a day
for problems. If you saw him from above,
you’d see his hair, his coffee. You wouldn’t see
his problems, would you? Also, you’d be tall,
so let’s forget all that. Let us instead
describe him. Let’s make a heroic effort,
pin him down with a word. Now here it goes:
dark. No, that’s his coffee. Our bloke’s hair
is dark as well, but that’s not what I meant –
What’s meaning, really? thinks some bloke somewhere.
Fuck coffee, I’m off for a Guinness, I am,
thinks the dark-haired bloke in the you-know-what,
soon to be himself, but somewhere else.
*
Meanwhile, the lady walking down the street
is in the street and walking. Walking quickly,
but not so quick to make a liar of me.
Her high heels make the noise they make. Her clothes
are what she’s wearing. Sure, yes, she’s late,
but doesn’t have a watch, or has a watch,
but hasn’t time to check it, being late.
How is the weather? Pissing down. Umbrellas
hover over heads like oh-so-faithful,
massive-winged and oh yes, somehow, handled
blackbirds. So much for similes. Our lady’s
just passing what she might call a boutique,
so let’s look in the window now and see her.
What is she like exactly? Violently
dimpled. A handbag which contains precisely
nothing. A heartbreaking nose that’s pointing
at where she’s going. In short, you know, a lady:
to see her dodge round puddles is to see her
dosey doe. She makes a bloke a bloke
who’s sitting in a coffee shop and waiting.
*
Who’s thinking he’s been stood up, actually,
so what he is is getting up and leaving,
thinking his thoughts – that’s not your thoughts, his thoughts –
though if you saw his face now then your thoughts
would be Poor bloke. Listen, that’s his best
brogues he put on just for her this morning,
after his best socks (he finds that order
sensible), making the noise they make,
as he moves to the door. What do you call that,
clomping? Forgive me: rarely could a pair
of brogues have generated quite so much
pathos. At the door, he stops to light
one of the cigarettes she doesn’t like,
puffing it so violently, you’d think
he’s thinking – ooh – of puffing it at her.
The rain, you say? He’s getting wet? He’s under
the awning, ain’t he? Shows what you know, reader.
So now the bloke in the coffee shop’s the bloke
outside who’s looking north towards The Dog,
shuffling, smoking and not going there yet.
*
Meanwhile, the lady walking down the street
is in the street and walking. She’s what, a hundred
yards away and can’t see our man yet,
what with the crowds, the brollies hovering
like we said they were hovering before.
And so we come – huh hum – to the dramatic
part of the poem: here’s our protagonist,
our love interest. It’s not for me to say
which is which, things being what they are
post-feminism, post-structuralism, pre-
the Big Question. The Big Question is,
will these two meet? Now let me answer that:
watch this. The lady walking down the street
is rushing, look, so quickly to her date,
she trips and lands at the feet of our bloke
and in that instant she’s thinking two things –
Aaaahhhh and What a lovely pair of brogues.
He helps her up, into the coffee shop,
to meet the bloke she’s meeting – someone else,
some chukka-booted bloke in the coffee shop.
*
Now our bloke makes his way towards the pub
and doesn’t see his girl again or sees her
and gives up coffee at New Year, or switches
to decaf for a bit, as his brogues slowly
wear or sit unworn in his wardrobe
and the weather brightens up or, more than likely,
doesn’t. All that’s in the future. Now
our lady sits recovering with a latte,
chatting to the bloke she’s there to meet.
She isn’t thinking of our man at all,
or is she? Is she? Not my place to say –
as I sit with espresso and a pen
and look out through the window at people passing,
so close they could reach out and touch each other –
not my place to say if she’ll buy her man
a lovely pair of brogues for his next birthday,
or in this hour before the café closes,
if she’ll look out at the rain and think this,
or something like this, brushing her grazed palm:
The touch. His hand. The warm touch of his hand.
Aquafit
Mondays. 7pm. The ladies
sink into the pool,
chat of their parents’ health, their daughters’ work.
Their bathing suits are holding something back.
Squat thrusts and shuttle runs:
they walk in the water.
The instructress stands above them like a billboard,
mimicking them: ‘And right, and left, and...’.
In the men’s changing room,
a boy in council uniform
sweeps the dregs of shampoo to the drain.
From the pool come love songs.
4
Bookcase Thrown through Third Floor Window
It has The Complete Jane Austen,
The Nurse’s Dictionary of Medicine,
and here it comes, crashing through the window.
It has The Collected Shakespeare, The Holy Bible,
and as it falls, books tumble from its shelves,
open out, use themselves as parachutes.
Then it hits the road.
Noise and dust everywhere.
It’s tall as a dead man, a toppled sentry box.
My neighbours, my friends,
in a circle, are wielding
frying pans, rakes, brushes and mops,
closing in on the bookcase.
I grab a dustbin lid and maintain eye contact.
Restaurant where I am the Maître d’ and the Chef is my Unconscious
I put through an order for spaghetti aglio e olio.
He sends out a soup bowl full of blue emulsion.
A regular asks for lamb shank with rosemary.
Out comes a beetroot served with a corkscrew.
Someone I suspect of being a restaurant reviewer
orders the baked rum and chocolate pudding.
A mermaid rides a horse out of the kitchen.
He locks himself in there for days.
All I get are incoherent mumblings,
often in French. Some nights after closing time,
we sit down together with a glass or two,
get on famously, see eye-to-eye.
Next day he sits in a deck chair all through service,
wearing a paper hat and a tie-dyed surplice.
‘That’s it,’ I say, ‘I’m speaking to the owner.’
That night, he shakes me awake,
takes the lid off a serving dish:
an actual star he’s taken out of the sky
and put on a plate. I know it’s only a dream,
but next evening I’m bright and early at the restaurant,
shouting the orders, shaking the customers’ hands,
picking bits of gold out of my teeth.
Rilke at War
The smallest uniform they make buries him
and after three weeks of paying lip service
to the parade ground’s language
of grunts, its dactylic
Hup-two-three, the days of marching to
nowhere, slowly, mocked for his nancy’s
middle name, the army find
the perfect place in war for him:
the archives. His office hours are nine till three
and he has the freedom of Vienna, an apartment
with window boxes, a genial
First Lieutenant. In days,
they’ve had to bump him down from propaganda
to card-filing, page-ruling,
but even that leaves him so exhausted,
he’s in bed by eight each night and writing
nothing. Meanwhile, Europe is becoming
mud; my grandad comes back from the Somme
without a brother. Meanwhile, Rilke
sits in a patron’s summer garden, drinking tea.
Tomorrow, he’ll ask again about a full discharge,
but this afternoon he has his portrait painted
by a girl he cannot stand who shares his bed.
Now the china tinkles. His eyes dart up.
Seal
His eyes are deeper dark within his dark.
Corkscrewing, dipsy-doing, allez-oop,
he loops the loop, the water his slow-motion
world, this swimmer synchronised with himself.
He floats on his back, lying in the hammock
of his body. This is his gift, his talent: head
over heels, tail over head, unfolding,
barrel-rolling, forgetting which end of him
is which, now all is circle, all is swim.
He surfaces to bark This rock is mine,
lies there, breathing into November air,
smoking the Havana of himself,
munches sprats, mulling over his dance,
offers his stink, his easy-to-please hands.
The Hippo
is solo, hobo, incognito,
two boulders curving out of Dettol-murk,
in a zoo his photo advertises,
doing a sponsored sitting-still all day.
Stop being a cliché, hippo, or I won’t
write a poem about you. Then you’ll be sorry.
What is your body but the verb To wallow?
What is the water but a part of self?
Google says you can crush a Ford Sierra
between your jaws. They don’t say how they test this.
Candyfloss-high boys crowd your glass, betting
they could hold their breath underwater longer,
they could leap from one boulder to the other.
I abandon you
for the giraffes, stupid as window cleaners,
the lions, sunshine with teeth,
but keep coming back:
if you were to rise, show your eyes, your mouth,
would you have Martin Sheen’s mud-crazy face,
breaking smoke-water in Apocalypse Now?
Closing time. One last go. O please, hippo,
don’t be so self-effacing, so tight-fisted.
Come on out, don’t you know
we love you? Wait. Is that a flash of flesh,
a hippo peepshow, or are you still snoozing?
A little girl says, Dad, that island’s moving.
Flamingos
Who spra
y-painted the swans? You dilly-dally,
shilly-shally in the shallow end
on Meccano legs, your day a foot massage,
curve your neck into a clothes hanger
for your rose-hue tutu and your feather boa.
You’re every little girl’s dream, a shock, a flock
of neon signs, advertising candyfloss.
Why do you blush so much? Each time you eat,
you have to kiss the you-shaped bird who floats
in the lake surface, steal food from its throat.
February. Outside’s a place of grey
line managers, timetabled rain, the bus.
But with your silly-billy, Vegas waitress,
camouflage-for-a-world-of-joy body,
Fuck that, you say, let’s all be fabulous.
Cheerleaders
They cartwheel, high-kick, hair-flick on, all sing-song,
all pom-poms, exclamation marks at the end
of whatever their hands are saying. They’re all angles,
uniformed as superheroes, in their star-spangled
skirts, their belly buttons. They drop into a huddle
to Ra-ra-ra, make their bodies jumping stars,
now doing the splits, now falling to their knees,
or touching cowboy boot toes to their cheeks.
Their synchronised smiles say nothing can be wrong.
A final, faultless somersault and they’re gone.
In the bleachers, we sit on. A tinny tannoy. Wind
plays the tuning forks at either end of the pitch.
We make ourselves bigger with giant foam hands.
Now, here come the men with their metal helmets,
their little ball, their protective shoulder pads.
Bouncers
Undertakers’ coats buttoned to their throats,
they applaud their own performance to keep warm.
Like teenage girls they shift from foot to foot,
cheeks rouged by neon signs: The Velvet Room.
Misers’ hands buried in their pockets,
the guest list’s folded up next to their wallets.
They have the miraculous visions of a prophet
over the shoulder of whoever they’re talking to.
They’ll drive home at three or four and wake at noon
with no hangover, wrap their fists around
the kettle, make tea for their tiny girlfriends.
But for now, it’s ‘Pal, there’s no trainers allowed,’
as this child, leaving the theatre, points at them:
‘Mummy, look at the unhappy men.’