So-So Drunk, Not So Drunk

You worry what you might have said?

My memory is good – but you’d

Rather not know. Yet surely you won’t mind

If I now tell you what, tonight, you did not say.


Never a syllable passed on a brow

Or garment or eye of a single man.

(Though tentative knives set about carving

At women, but that does does not count)


Suppose a yardarm had been raised,

Suppose a gallows-tree had creaked,

Suppose an oath had tied a mind, and then

Suppose what speech I could have made.


As I recall, I made it, and, along two anecdotes,

Clothpegged it hung strangled out and beat down.

That was before I tumbled and I ripped

And my dialogue became, well, less exact.


Before I fell, too, I talked with a prize

Bitch nestled in an alpha-nursed boudoir

Who joined her voice to throw my essay out

Perhaps remembering how I’d mocked hers,

In academic sense. Quite well set up,

These folk can play at prophets, powerful,

Unerring, right, salted and harnessed spite,

A cartel on an unknown-purging ride.

You see I wasn’t playing.


You weren’t playful; set to sleep, your mind

Quite lax. You did not declare love

For any being (inc. me) as you know,

You moved those limpid arms from side to side,

You stuck by rowing, analysed your course.

You went to bed.

You aren’t dull. You weren’t hoarse.


The night is small just as the quad is cold

And square shaped and contains none else.

The chorus part and gouged cloth is the king’s.