Onstage I bellowed verses to the sky
beside a bunting-woven campsite.
“I’d never seen an aura glow so high!”
you chirped, in my front garden.
A fox-cub stared at us perched on a dustbin.
Beneath the glare of orange lamplight
and puppy, I unleashed my trapped combustion
and kissed you like a Spartan.
Your dreadlocks blazed like sheaves of copper wire.
Your energy could floor a horseman,
leaping off your hand in waves of fire
that almost singed my arm-hair.
From greengrocer to greengrocer you’d tramp
for crops you’d prod around a saucepan
or snapshot balanced on my lava-lamp
and other plug-fed hardware.
Meat would never pass your paintless lips.
Your chakras chimed in time with Brahma.
Every week you’d sally forth on trips
for bold ghost-hunting gourmets.
We prowled around a ransacked office block,
a bullet-littered maze of drama,
a mouldy mossy-carpeted stopped clock
with crumbling doorless doorways.
Festooned with fungus-garnished filing cabinets,
those battered silent rooms had waited
to yank us in like rotting boxy magnets
that shivered like a hospice.
A nitrous oxide tap. Some cardboard signs:
“All occupants evacuated”.
We phoned the local press about our finds
in Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
That night we made love underneath a willow
behind the lake. And then, no more.
Did I hound you? For some peccadillo,
you strutted out on me.
You snatched a job with journalists who snuck
a fox’s head inside your drawer.
I wanted to call round and offer a hug,
but it was not to be.
