OUTCLASSED

Why’d you do it with nothing to round the fact

As you would say, “Drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes!”

As a matron of the Temperance Movement, a participant

Not really participating, but enjoying the quotations of vice

For their sake, as a teacher eating her chalk to spew lessons

Or my racket, beyond every girl’s Rubicon: outclassed

THE GIG IS UP

The gig is up

for your troubles

and fake jewellery

that you sweated for once

under the moon in your bed

BOUQUET

I felt close to you

Even as I heard you

Snicker at this poem

And my sodden bouquet

JULIAN SHOWED

I had now given the Greeks to the grave
game of spurring. Ajax had played his
jacks for tonight.

Their equations lost to a stark-eye lull.
A riptide anxiety broke the exchange
of warm beer, recall and focal laughs.

Retreat: the enclosure of a mystic.
That wooden-fixed anchoress that
never fixed her hair for love, never
toiled the earth for a showing, but
pitied herself to recollect her Trinity.

Fallen men became breakfast, stuck to
a ruined bed that was her square for
an uncomfortable bliss that was sure
and the vehicle for our heaven.

EARLY MORNING

Sleep and fawn the memory

You sold for a vertical drip

They call a cure

Your recovery

You’re laughing

At the lighting

GENTLY DEPRESSED

Gently depressed

I tow to her bind

As alabaster soils

THROUGH A TEXT

I Have Not Found Yet

Anything Or Nothing

My Lust Exaggerated

I Creep To The Smoke

I Don’t Understand The

Parable Of The Unjust

Steward Except When

Honouring My Debts

For Undertones Of Loss

Freedom In Cash And

The Lecturer As King

Makes Me Sadly Aureate

The Girl Never Reached

And Their Study Shackled

To Binary Sibilant Opposites

And Callow Axioms Teach

Unaware Movie Stars Are Just

Now The New Saints Of Glory

Leave Your Paraffin & Cicatrice

At The Door Of Your Entrance

For An Academic By Nature Spins

As One By Trade Or Commerce