David
Bircumshaw
As when at darkness and at traffic lights
jammed together they both came home and found
no things nor words to talk about, or at
that late night news, when she looked there at him,
slumped in the chair, some Vin de Sol, half-drunk,
a fag or two stubbed out, and the thought struck:
slippers soon; or as an overwrought alarm,
on another workday morning, with last night's
dishes still unclean, that calm routine
of the first cup, oily, Ta!'d, broken
by half-woken uninvited hand delights,
brute as a bullwhip or a baton charge,
shocks, jars, so their fourth and fifth years
of love-cooled marriage just endured.
So as a thing pursued, and found, refused,
to familial tutted glooms inured, green gibes
blue bawds ignored, as faith promised bonds
of limb-locked bliss ( a claim unfound in small
contents ) as at the disco, in lurex and laser
lit, faster dancing faster, till their legs
stalled; or on a Sunday morning mattress,
their buttocks rhythm heaving, till the spasm
of the one moment spilled, and flopped down
slow through the dropped hormone flow, fell,
as on a doormat water, power, rent
and credit-card demands, entropies that glued
each month exact; so their life, lives, together,
undeveloped, and a bone-cloud, hard-browed,
puckered young foreheads as they paused, bound.
