Seconds

No child,
To be fair, but few,
And fewer who'd recall,
Thinks about one of TH White's
Cruder Gallic stereotypes
Sir Lancelot's squire, Uncle Dap
Greasing up rusty bones inside
His cancerous cuirass.

But that desire to keep age close
Is still a thing we understand.
I don't dare to be known grown up,
I stutter in all but two pubs,
And firmer humans than I am still hold to former hands.
The risk's the last set's had must be, to us, a very fearful dose.

Article: you are beautiful
When beauty is a licensed point,
And in art stand empirical.

Your separatehood accounted for
In script's elastic ambergris,
You back him up professional like,
She, warming, tenders me.

We fired first by turning up
And you had winged me two years back.
The bullet with your name on it
Stored in these vocal veins.

He reloaded the cartridges with keys,
His beard kept pointing down, so, powder-free;
My medico would have sluiced smelling-salts
Were she not down with me.

Well, there's a something that cats do
(Beasts for whom you lack sympathy
Though they be)

Their angle poised necked such a way
That you can't bond with them head-on
Unless you're otiose to stares
They hide undersong walrus smiles
Just like those madeup shotsmoke eyes
Scan, as it might be, unawares.

Against Langland

The flesh is no dungeon

Rather then a cauldron

For roasting unfatted

It simmers to boil -

the flesh, not like a garden,

But a tasked allotment,

has truck with no burden

of blandishing hurdles.

Though the flesh is no tower

(nor even verandah),

A balcony only

with jerry-built slats,

We should stand out come evening,

Full knowing it's raining.

The Last Frittata

I hope, and (though I would prefer
Writing to saying so) believe,
The supper that I left to you
Is beautiful (off the record
It is, trust me, quite beautiful).

I made it, as, of course, you know,
'It's a fact you'd be first', indeed,
'To acknowledge'. Not, perhaps, foremost
In specifying - but I asked
for neither, nor for memory,

As I was making a beautiful supper
To last you some time, anyway.

Who's She?

Can she know it's against them,

Her long-term interests,

Craning forward her bright and her versatile neck,

Can she know that it baulks her,

That short-term advantage,

As she blocks, sidle-shouldering

The sauce of the fleck?

That hers is the meal, the least of the thing,

As hers is my service, hers my forced restraining,

As mine the maintaining, the spoon and the washing

For her clutch's gelled fattening?

He knows nothing about that, the long term advantage,

I'd clean up some cleaning and dine here and now,

This is pleasure; why hang up on sameness and order?

It doesn't stop ordure; human, confess now

How more than disgust took to staining your brow.

Hard to be a flynn

When I first listened to you you were overplayed and worn
In a room I thought so beautiful it justified my scorn
And I mean I barely heard you as I stared about as well
And wondered if I’d ever yet be touched by any hell

It took Christmas and tinniness
It took being alone, still
That drive to claim a corner -
You constituted firmly lobes from someone else’s mind
You colonised your sceptic with a lacing of unpride
You made him wonder if he’d heard his hell

And sure I overplayed in turn and made distinctions then
And some died for much longer and some got better when
They’d been born a wee bit stunted but they geared themselves up well
So all in all I got convinced you sang me from your hell

I saw you once by accident yellowly in your voice
And I thought you might yourself be hell by choice

I got in pride and stumbling and found I irked again
I couldn’t even take a bare refrain

I met aspirant seraphs who warned you were going down
And I met all further loving with a screeching kind of frown
I thought you’d bought plots in heaven and could be none of mine
But I heard the current while I blanked the shine

It took all the dim faces
It took the bench’s spaces
I saw her staring sharp devoted fear,
And the virtues joying at last sealing swell
Flynn you’re mine on demand
Flynn you’re mine by free will
We’ll wander hand in hand then into hell.

a subtle gratualy in the rights of melancholy

sgalli gp in babylove
no, suppose not
ang' ae bat thee, proversial
eyelick. All ov,
are you drunk
mine is none since fri
are you drunk
no, suppose not

sgalli gp in babylove
atch was drunk sat think – hmm?
scar and chilled weirdly unin-
terediesting estuff.
Hard dod to see
This as a tragedy…

you were looking very Social,
today. is an uncomfortabable
fake – as john keats said, or bryron
etc – what are you
Talking about? There’s not a joy –
i'm rwiting this in the mittle of the great automn tragedy,
there’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away

mine is none since fri. Radio 4, in the very existence
Of a bee orchid, ang ae bat thee
Proversial eyelick - ! – radio 4
Guitarist iaian large! Suppose not,
- Boring – Bryron - sgalli gp
In babylove?

The Course of True Love (under commission)

He was telling his tall story in the kitchen again

She could tell it right back, it was got quite that

Systematic. And since it was stodgily beautiful

She felt free to make out, well, enigma variations

Course I could feel the current.

You're leaving out the glaciers again,

darling.

Have you ever had that feeling

When the storm glowers its worst

Shines in its own bale

And you're soaked to the bone like an oxo-cube

And you sort of, when it comes down to it, want more...

Come now, it was only a showery spell,

Angel-features.