Poems

Just admire this ewer, this flasket,
this carafe – aren’t they more elegant
than the living heads of giraffes?

The history of emancipation.

Overtaken, riding uphill.

Advertisements asked ‘Which twin has the Toni?’
Our mothers were supposed to be non-plussed.
Dense paragraphs of technical baloney
Explained the close resemblance of the phoney
To the Expensive Perm. It worked on trust.

The skywriter fallen,

a slick of lightning foraged in the stars

for his remains.

At night the eyes return
to chaopolitan Pigalle,
its bright explicit boulevards,
those jagged unlit backstreets,
women lean and watch.

The leaves of Tower Bridge are rigged to open
For any taxi I might chance to catch.
They say that when the ravens leave the Tower

One carnation broke off from its stem
while I was arranging the vases –
one white carnation
from a bunch of whites and reds:

If T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
Came back to life, again it would be found
One had the gab, the other had the gift
And each looked to the other for a lift ...

We were gone from each other;
we were throwing out small talk,
half-sent smiles, unmeant like mist.