The Backbone

Girl E

Of 28 caterpillar cakes

In the bathroom, swept down,

The plughole mutters an oops breath

A secret release, MOOD, has escaped

Into the underground network-rail

Of drained London, a rat’s warren.

Grimy kitchen counters breath

Slick with Campari and the secret

Rubicund glow of our weekend selves.

She is served cake, after cake,

After Colin Caterpillar cake.

Each time, we re-wind the set

like a VHS tape you can see the cake,

- one, two, three and four -

On clicking cameras

They show her face screwed up

Blowing out candles, she’ll

Be 68, at this rate.

We worshipped her birthday seven

Times that night, passing from

Dark to candle-bright, dancing on

Cushion covers and staining ceilings.

You craved for attention,

More attention than the candles

Blinking with bright London-blues.

You scowled at discarded glasses

Mind sweeping to stop yourself

Swirling to the starved rats below.

The N155 night bus only bends

You so far. Stapled in Trevelyan Road.

Take off the week, my sweet

Let eye-slips sleep, you mutter

To mirrors reflecting your speak.

No one else cleaned up

Clad counters the next rising morn.

It didn’t matter us party-goers

Remained tucked into our

Sweaty selves in secret sheets

Because she had her tribe of merry men.

24 February 2023

Paddington to Bath train

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Part E

She crouches, infantile, heaving, on the green carpeted post-war floor as bottles of Parliamentary prosecco march down the voting chamber. And that clown she was screwing in September makes an appearance in placid leather. The joker. That’s the thing about her personal politics: they’re hollow. She’s persistently bulking herself with bubbles, not grasping that their fast fragility will be her drop-down depression.

29 November 2019

The Hurst, Shropshire

Poster print of happiness

Pulling over at the service station

And it inadvertently being the same one

We stopped at last summer

In a post-Avalon haze

Fields of glitter marking us like skin-tags

We were all strawberry suntans and smiles

Glued to a brazen hope we’d escape the

Paranormal activity of our craniums that always follows

Our shrinking skulls placed in microwaves

Going round and round and round and round

Till brain cells are parched like dried prunes

If this is happiness, I’ll take another bite please.

***

25 November 2019

Arvon Week, Shropshire