Passport Renewal

A conscious smile is hard enough to pull

Off, but I did it, sort of pretty well,

For Snappy Snaps, where I once saw a dame

From Atalanta chat God with the Turk.


The screen is grey, the shirt is checked, the bars

Of black marking out rims, squares, teeth

Between the edges of that cheeky smile,

That smiling cheek that forswore dignity,

That looked as if it cared about Darfur


(Or Zimbabwe. More current). Eyes go ho

Ho ho, I am aware of this ridicule,

And I accept it, because I am British,

Microchipped in with civic mockery.


Turns out that doesn’t play out. Service with

A smile, but the citizen must stand

Taut and oppressed, looking just as he feels.


Take two. Cheaper. I see her hesitate,

My Slovenian handmaiden, and then,

She develops a fourfold look that could

Recruit for Zanu-PF. Even, should.

Such Is The Breath

No one, then, loved America like George –

Not Washington, not Bush, the uber George –

The Royal George, the Bennett-destined King.


She spurned him lengthily; he could not know

That he must renounce her, nor could he plan

For it. He looked with certainty at maps,

A real, if an amorous, kind of love.


“Bring me Lord North.” “Your Majesty.”

“Ah, North. Good, just the chap.

Tell me about this stretch over here,

The colony I see is named Maryland.”

“My liege, of Marilyn I’ll tell you all.”


“Marilyn!?

Wait, North, you mean to say

That all the time I’m miscarried that name?”

“You are incapable of such, Sire. Recall indeed

The English language is your fief, the stress,

Orthography, doctor, dictionary, all.”


“Shut up, North. Don’t you see this matters to me.

I have plans. When we have hanged the troublemakers there

I want a summer-palace high in…Marilyn.

The Queen mentioned it quite the other night.

The climate’s good, the people sturdy folk,

Protestant, and unplagued by dicing-dives,

Which pleases me; I’ll curb the Princes’ debts.”

“The plan is feasible, certes, my liege.”


***

A King has Sport, and Rights, and Breath,

And optimism is a fitting train.

I’ll bite a warning into my cheek’s side,

But still when morning smudges indistinct,

I’ll frame your daughters’ lineaments;

Solve their quarrels, sort their rooms.

Downy Sent Down

Ten bairns headed to Buckinghamshire,

The watery jaundice and swart nebulae,

With Mummy, now used to her parenting role

Being wielded by men in a truck –

She barely extends chiding wings any more.


One maid high up at the Raven Hotel

Climbing the Balliol Jowett-reared eaves,

Victorian Gothic, Edwardian pleasure,

Where Mummy could never have guided her,

Never so well as a battel-free beak.


Another slip last thought of the strange affront,

The loud, black-fletched boy, like a boisterous brother,

Swelled by Mummy’s intemperate spoiling,

Deprived of feathers and gorged on power,

The scent of the cooing snatch echoing around her.


Mummy screeched her off, did her bit by the rest,

Especially those seven hardy drake sons,

She can feel quite proud as she stretches her neck

Back to non-intervention, and pecks at a butt

She managed to ply from the gardeners’ woe.


The girls may come back with broods of their own –

If they’re up to it – judging by 8 and 11…

In any case, the lads will get strong, greenheaded,

Grow up to be drakely, and plump, and perhaps

Like Daddy, or Uncle, will help Balliol’s rowing.

Explanation of my college room's relative bareness

People express surprise upon

The starkness of my shelves.

I’ll pin it down between ourselves:

I am famous for reading

And I cannot.


Sure, pragmata also there,

I don’t care much for lugging things.

If it were only the teeth-grinding,

The arched cat-maundered shoulders – but

The blaming also, the incompetence,

The damage. No, no carrier I.


But this too is misleading. What I want

Or wanted, lay at first in carrying,

In hitting, running. The black reading-lamp

Was step two, the caste-marker,

Could not be shaken off.


I never treasured them, the blocks,

Never relished their smell. They were

A substance to block out non-time,

A sharp, negative means.


Why should I fill the chasms

With the cowls that kept me down and in,

In for the count, but quarantined?

From the Fairy Castle: The Artist's Tales

He was a tall sort of a man

A weathered one, a frayed, and wild,

And measured, but a hearty fastbreaker.

His name I knew. But why had I

Expected the dissembling colour here?


What do you do, you principles,

You moral mariners, when having met

Belial, you find all you ever sought?

What if you swoon before the black K’aaba

And wake in a Palladian garden?


A grey sort of a man, he was

To look at, dark red as you heard

His voice, slow, keeping back the best,

His laugh, disdaining worse.


Cold eyes with warm attention – if

A carnivore, one of our blood,

With fur and cubs and eddying temperature.

He etched, his wife related, their girl hid,

Not his stories, but those about him, wrothe,

Familiars, warnings, dark-quilt bedroom slippers.