Volley'd and Thunder'd

“Never trust a poet.”  That’s what Daddy said to me,

when I was knock-kneed in the factory

and knocked up on the floor

while the whiff of something more

drowned in Brut and milky tea.

Lord Tennyson was late again

and half a league behind me

so he missed the mouth of hell

I described so bloody well

after waiting in the mill for him to find me

And the body odour hugged me, brotherly

with a slightly leering passage to the right

where the rotten gods had laced their boots up tight

and sabres bared, they left

to assault the barren cleft

while the mothers waved their banners in the lee

Trust a poet’s patterns while he traces them in air

for wayward thumbs to print in stammered ink

and bloodied girls to think

there’s an exit from the pink

to erase the flash of muddy underwear

But disillusion issues cold

from waters barely flowing

where currents travel there and back

but in between their charge is slack

and lives drift by, delightfully unknowing