they’ll turn the turret lid back like a stone;

inside, our faces set like flint, her name

cross-threaded in the barrels of our throats.

I have this from reliable sources:

boys, with our letters, our first class honours

and diplomas we are tenfold brighter

than her sons and daughters put together.

But someone hangs on every word they speak,

and let me mention here the hummingbird

that seems suspended at the orchid’s lips,

or else the bird that picks the hippo’s teeth.

Boys, if we burn, she will not pass one drop

of water over us, and if we drown

she will not let a belt or bootlace down,

or lend a hand. She’ll turn instead and show

a leg, a stocking, sheer and ladderless.

And even then we will not lose our heads

by mouthing an air bubble out of turn

or spouting a smoke ring against her name.

But worse than this, in handouts and speeches

she will care for us, and cannot mean it.

Picture the stroke of the hour that takes her:

our faces will freeze as if the wind had changed,

we shall hear in our hearts a note, a murmur,

and talk in terms of where we stood, how struck,

how still we were the moment this happened,

in good faith, as if it really mattered.

NOT THE FURNITURE GAME

His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney

and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in

and his blink was a cat flap

and his teeth were bluestones or Easter Island statues

and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.

His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.

And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt

and his last smile was a caesarean section

and his tongue was an iguanodon

and his whistle was a laser beam

and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.

He coughed, and it was malt whisky.

And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards

and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing-line

and his neck was a bandstand

and his Adam’s apple was a ball cock

and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.

His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.

And his wrists were ankles

and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub

and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits

and the palms of his hands were action paintings

and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.

And his shadow was an opencast mine.

And his dog was a sentry-box with no one in it

and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children

and his nipples were timers for incendiary devices

and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the meat-cleaving competition

and his belly-button was the Falkland Islands

and his private parts were the Bermuda Triangle

and his backside was a priest hole

and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.

The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.