Poetry

Where do we go, when the night is done?
When the leaving lights are on
and new flesh inspected?
A baffled pallor the neon corrected;
our mucky urges distilled
to melted ice and flat ginger,
collected and scrubbed, no time to linger -
the cattle drive begins anew!

A rub of rib beneath the chiffon
or downy brush the greeting drew.
You thought her eyes were yours,
her soft ears gilded plenty
and cheaply bought and nibbled gently –
but no, not so; on this night
(a night that’s nearly done)
the rub was thumbed
and flicked by a Danish nose
and all of your enchanted prose
did not a folio fill, with the stage so full
and the audience too indisposed
to make the players earn their sacks of wool.
What a poor playhouse for a scrivener.

Mules and quickstep and glances,
repeated lines and pregnant, ugly dances.
Hands do dare, yes dare,
from time to time,
to hover near and risk impropriety
when lips, lean and lent to enquiry,
conspire with wheat and vine
to subjugate the tresses. What a fiasco!
Methuselahs they will be before the maid professes!

Mirror, mirror on the ball,
Morse code on the ruby wall, dots
not “M’aidez”
but “Dash it all, abandon ship!”
Rats: run the rope before the sink!
Seek the wharf before she takes to drink!

Ashore,
before the drunken tug that thumps the tub
hits the hull and spills the cinders;
before the lumps are smeared by shambling fingers
and slight shifts stripped and dismissed
upon the strange twist like boneless mannequins
and clavicles bit and femurs cinched
and follicles fraught
and honour filched,
and blood rushes you to indiscretion.

Ashore,
before the dawn forgives your blushes -
naked among the reeds, flattened by your impression.
Rusted mariners in slingbacks and Chelsea’s,
seeking a dry dock,
seeking to be locked
and berthed on oaken block;
finding only squalls, doldrums,
stoic tea and taxis.

The baton is tapped to a hush, then.
Coda for a cor anglais,
solo doulo cuts the air like a putdown -
well met at this hour, but not often;
no story here, eager men,
no tale to set the flagons frothing,
no; this yarn has made a poor cardigan.
Where did you go,
when the night was done?

This life in bottles,
silica sand scorched and blown
or trickled down
past the shoulder – callous caressed
and turned to face, or faced away -
down past neckline and hourglass
to the rump
to the sump, the grape and grain coalesced.

Petal dropped, hat topped and flipped
and frisked for bouquets.
Nothing dismays, makes one so blue
as a trick of the beady eye,
sleight of hand of shuttered spy,
that turns in time not to be true.

We are paper caught in the swirl by a Turkish eatery,
a Jew embossed on a riveted seam.
We reek of the scent on a neck of an unwelcome distraction,
slit with a stiffener in a candystriped collar.
We are unleavened bread in a castaway hull,
hackneyed and wordless and borrowed from Gaia.
We crunch to the cave where the masks are hung,
swaying like leaves on the Bodhi Tree.

We are under the blanket and tranquil and finished.