a lot of people are
passing and I want to join them, but my window is below street level
unlike Jane Eyre’s, I will take up my red mandolin and practice by the
ice-floe the road becomes just round the corner, in an empty
carousel of peeling paint and red iron columns, van cornering into
view is Mr Basin, breezy baker, traffic lights winking, long green
cigarette dangling, hair plastered to his knobbly head like
cellophane … and it is 1989 …
Atop a high sail
In salt weather
High and rather frightened
I stand on my toes
A ballerina sick of lonely nights and dreams
I want to be
As I seem
Windy me on toes
Above the clouds
I would like to go out, but
I’m not allowed
All along the side roads
The mocking-flower grew
And laughed at the travellers
Although they were few
The sweet summer rain
Fell in veils every year
In the autumn bends
Of the silver lane
In the snow lies a friend
By a golden stain
And cutting up the Hope diamond
And removing it from my flat in suitcases
At two a.m. to deposit it all over town
Cry me to sleep
backdating thoughts is very hard
Golden glass girls and storms at sea
Satin rain
High fashion bead-dolls
Hips of the century
Shifting timelessly
Through the vegetable years
Glancing off shopfronts
Like a soap carving
Bleeding a hail of gold
When you undress beneath the thunder
Crying bridges fall
Do not get caught
In the abscesses of the mind
They are steel webs
Crushing with sweaty legs —
The scrum, straining time,
Of a world that hates ballerinas
Prostrates the air and breathes dust
A world that cries bloodstains
And licks up sleep
Backhanding kindnesses
And selling murder
To the man who rips up smiles.
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