For now, I am a little unreachable

I have shocked myself with a sudden move
into the woods. Last month I was crying
for London, the backaches, the suits,
the solitaire. A friend said god that’s so you isn’t it,
moving to the middle of fucking nowhere.
But I thought I was a city rat
keeping atomic time, a three year railcard, a tut
tut in my mouth, zero cash in my purse.

For now, catch me prying gossip from sheep, arguing
with the dying daffodils about how rice milk
beats cow’s milk, why you can’t trust the BBC
(especially during an election). The stars are out tonight
and up here on my favourite branch
I am begging the pheasants to tell me
who is missing me
when they are screaming alight here
for the Natural History Museum!
and I, personally, am missing no one.

On cleansing the Earth of filth

Here I am, obsessed with the romance
of communism. Mayakovsky, I do envy you,
citizen of the USSR, but why not give me a little smile?
Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, I envy you too!
I pray to hold hands with you brightly, treasured cosmonaut,
after you land here where I am
which is nowhere and yes! I will marry you
and yes, I might carry your beaming bread roll babies.

Perhaps darling Sylvia was right
that every woman adores a fascist but I am a girl
who floods her basement for communists
who look like brutes but are not brutes,
who speak to clouds; tell them not to rain.

This will get me in trouble
but looking at Stalin’s portrait at the Royal Academy of Arts
I did feel for a very long moment
amid whispers of Red Terror and our recently deceased
Comrade Fidel Castro, quite violently
heterosexual.

O savoury cement,

my darling peanut butter, seal the space between tooth
and gum, tongue to roof, clamp my whole mouth shut,

stop me speaking about the ugly things I don’t understand,
like cyborg feminism and post-irony.

It’s ugly when I talk too fast and crack long jokes about
beheading the rich, like a performative phone call on the bus.

Seep yourself into the bubbles between my knuckles. It’s ugly
when they pop like that. I’m ugly when I am by myself.

O my wholesome whole food love,
peanuts are more precious than diamonds.

Fill my bra so I have one that fits. Clog the magic 8 ball
so I can enjoy being a bit nutty in my uncertainties.

Squeeze into my walking boots so I can’t go out
and stuff the keyhole so nobody gets in.

Spread yourself sluggishly over the things I think I love;
every other page of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems,

Homage to Dylan Thomas on vinyl, my seat on the sofa
where I lounge about in swimming trunks
pretending to be literary.

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