It's Easy to Make a Cross



Just get a woman
standing behind you washing up.

Let her marry
before you meet her.

Ask a deaf girl to lip read
a foreign language,

a Korean find her mother's embrace
in a thin white bed.

'Writing about Prestwich for me is as valid as Dante writing about his circle of Hell.' Mark E Smith

Dream


Mike has one up on me.
Amanda is too thin.

-

Can a postcard be addressed to a girl
even though the instructions read 'thank him'?

Can a guard-dog be frightened by a squirrel?

Invigilation is not good for the nerves.

Can children grasp superlatives without comparatives first?

More Minor Poems



Here are some poems that are finished but would be hard to place in magazines due to their being too light or too weak:





At Rest


Yet I drag myself from here
to a sanitary gleaming washroom
where I dab my hair
with paper towels, shirt
striped dark with rain.

Ten stalls, no dryer.

I teach in a boardroom, decline coffee.

Ninety minutes pass.
The rain hasn't let up.
I close the door behind me
and step
back into the rain.





Graveyard Bus


The cemetery snow, thick as shadow.

Across the aisle, a man admires
a tortoiseshell comb thrust through auburn hair.
A gesture soft as piano.

Its owner turns and smiles as he exits
to his home bereft of furniture.





Touchdown


At home, the power is out.
Maybe for you in England this is not normal;
in Poland and this country is normal.
Maybe we will hold ourselves
in darkness tonight.

The waist draws from the hip,
from the ribs. On the ballerina's face
weight already fills the cheeks.





Nadia


Her sense of smell as one
with her specificity of colour -
olive green, burnt cherry.

I'd find a strand of her hair -
that tethered
to two colts could not be broken
but for the calling of its hue.





Speaking Up


She smiles at nudity in a retrospective
of Diane Arbus

if you are laughing when you are making love
you are probably doing it right

and me, so eager for assent
and acquiescent, I let it go

not to raise an untested voice,
break my hand with the back of the water.

Later, by the ausgang
I lean my head against a shoulder.





Car Share (Berlin - Hamburg)


We drive untouched past the edge of a storm
as a harmonica turns somewhere beneath the motor
and wind turbines whirl.

Everyone looks ahead.
Beneath a blanket, our warm joined hands.

The girl we picked up at the station, a waitress,
dropped off hours ago.





The College


Though I had a cachet -
just standing here inside the door of the library;

the children in on it too - pirouetting
and falling back into each other's arms
with a 'Shazaam!'

Chetsuko, Durga tumbling one after the other.

I marvel at the boy-girl at piano,
the mid-game chess-boards,
the computer room with books on tables,
electronic dictionaries open.

The minibus door slides aside.
Bodies come to claim them.





Write me a poem about summer's cut grass


I was vacillating.

The boxer blinked dumb as newsprint.

The piano keys like a lasso,
the player's signature
a disowned Russian, slow and her own.

Drapery.
The children colour in their own flags, shoulders
tired from the sloughing of them.





Towing the Line


The girls with hips like flat fish,
pockets visible beneath their jeans,
can't help but throw shapes outside
Dodgers - Private Room to Hire.

The window's chipped red frame
has a lot to do with spare time.
The Xmas lights aren't taken down,
just switched off the other seasons.

A tendency to self-opinion
holds hazards in Hastings and Ashford.
The girls, belt-loops like the arms of squat vases,
keep their smiles regular as buses.





Bed


I lowered her head against cool pillow,
a kiss on her brow. And would still
wish her there, in clean clothes.

She gazed at the flame,
the principle she could not crack
that drew her attention the way waves did.





Try Me


In the bookstore, bright by comparison
with the rainy street,
Dorothy Malone answers questions with questions,
coy as she is sly.

No and Yes aren't playful enough
for her: 'I've a bottle
of pretty good rye,' Bogart suggests;

'Well,' she replies, 'you can try me ...'





Transformations


I held and held her
until she stopped changing -
red triangle, green scissor, yellow star -
and when she was finally still
beside me

I wondered
if she hadn't slipped
a razor amid the pills
pushed by her fingers
past her teeth.