Wild flowers

The girl’s bright skin
shames the sunlight
of this early summer morning
and there is about her
an essence of memory
as she half walks, half dances
amongst the bluebells whose stalks are bowed,
her fair hair rising in a softness of cloud.

And I am a lifetime away,
longing to touch but fearing to hold,
like a threat of rain, unshed,
or a dark thorn in a young green field
when one step towards her enflames my guilt;
wild flowers, once picked, quickly wilt.

Sapphic

Your rainbow eye beckons me,
ease of sunlight through grass,
symphony of green
as the colours arc, a future not yet taken
in the shiver of fingers, your lips’ enticement,
peach and primrose, citrus,
blueberry, gold –
so well I know the shades your flesh makes
in my star-wild dreaming –
and I wish I could touch you
while the courage is on me
and I think one day I will,
one day soon I will step out of my skin,
the weight of unimagined expectation,
and slip snake-like, huntress and prey,
into your body’s gentle, drifting pasture
to take with me the taste of your breasts
on my tongue, the strange homecoming of sex
with the salt-sea swell of your rising
leading me to shore.

Image

Aged twenty-four, you bought your first leather jacket
in Carnaby Street, second-hand. Something
to celebrate
the closing years of youth,
an image to cling to of a life
you never had.

Black and sleek
it made me want to touch you
in a new way; you looked cool,
lean and hungry,
street-cred sharp.
The soft kindness of your eyes
belied any dangerous thoughts raised
by that wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am coat.

Ten years later,
the skin of our young marriage
maturing still in the sun’s golden throb,
you leant against a line
of fresh white-painted railings
and threw the past away.

Election Fever

Give us a plethora of ex-popes
who have ceased to be and are no more.
Rain down a riot of ramshackle royal marriages,
- discover men who’ve been six years dead
and still get poll tax reminders.
Post us a bevy of foreign princes, deceased,
all of them married to film stars!
Give us anything, anything at all, please God;
but spare us another month
(with one eye
on Snow’s wrinkled swingometer
and one eye
on that Bush backhander)
of lies,
prejudice,
bickering and senseless sound bites,
all the door-knocking/
teeth-cracking/
rubber-faced/back-stabbing pedagogic pile of putrid politicians.

We just don’t need it.

Being married

Sometimes when you’re out,
I make-believe at not being married
just to see if I still can.

… years drift away then
my shape transmutes -
a wolf, or cat,
playing out its silken independence
in the moonlight
until the bare stage is stilled,
lights melting to dawn
and the crowd of memories

I hang about my shoulders
like a talisman,
itself no more
- a forgetting
- a taking on: an inadmissible,
small
rebellion of the mind.

Autumn Wine

Crushed
midnight crimson
scented of a winter to come,
blackberries steeped in purple
of summer, in all its blazing sorrow,
its forgotten sense of flight –
sweet explosion on my tongue
hints of a deeper wine
bursting like a storm through flesh,
to lift me up beyond myself
and wing me to the dark.