Pomp And Circumstance
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I am not a proper English lady with
A husband and a warming open fire who
Sings pitch perfect in the acapella rock ladies
Singing group
Of another breed, I collect unnotable, sharp edged pottery fragments
Labouring beneath the neatly bonded red brick wall
Extricating the odd, delicately lodged shard which
Settles unsuspectedly in the unseen vales of knuckle and nail,
Learning to put humpty dumpty back together again.
I am not a nice English lady
I am chubby in places
chunks of my soul intertwined with my size
12-14 collection of fleshy outposts.
I am not cut of the dainty latticed white cloth of English ladies
With husbands who don’t thrive on lying.
I am eagle eyed and vigilant;
to fix my aim I light small candles with impeccable precision
I swallow the fear of old friends, unearthing the ancient bellows to help me breathe
As they protect their souls from the traitorous truth tattooed in my eyes,
When they unobtrusively turn down the next convenient isle in Sainsbury’s
Sliding into the air like furtive shadows, heads down
Fervently scrutinising the endless miracle of design on each row of carefully stacked cardboard cereal boxes.
The years that trail behind me like
Irreparably laddered, criss-crossing runs in adiscarded pair of silk stockings,
In the mornings, stepping into my skin and slowly stretching it up over my head
Cajoling it over bone and ungainly muscle
I observe that my fingernails are still pink.
And sometimes
Swaddled seamlessly in the dream that lies untouched among the flotsam and jetsam
the maelstrom of ten thousand unredeemed moments,
I am strolling barefooted on the salt bleached beach,
Sodden, into the long foamy tentacles at the end of the mighty waves’ toppling down journey,
In the spongy, freshly yeasted, steadily breathing sand
That bears the drifting imprint of arch and ball, heel and toe, born again
For an unrecordable instant.
