Mrs Bobbit’s bloomers

I like a bit of crumpet with my early morning tea
My baps are full to bursting point for all to plainly see
The chap from number thirty-one’s a slave to chapatti
And serenades my pumpernickel with alacrity

Mr Bate from twenty-eight is cream puff through and through
While Vincent Vaughan prefers the horn but wouldn’t pay for two
Sally Dean from seventeen won’t settle for the crumbs
With six to feed she might well need considerably bigger buns

So devil take your Angel Cake, your fancies and your bannocks
Your Delias and Blumenthals and erstwhile Fanny Craddocks
Feel free to squeeze my muffins and devour my chocolate spread
But one hand on my bloomers and you’ll wish you were brown bread

friends and lovers

unfurl slowly
plant the seed in summer
let it grow
a small tight thing
enclosed upon itself
within a close dark space

kaleidoscopic colour
autumn twirl
we’re underground
encased in loamy coffin
slowly curl, unfurl

I’ve dug inside before
exposed too soon to air and sky
and watched it die above the ground
slowly unfurl
by embryo and endosperm
but keep the seed coat closed
inviolate

winter knits a blanket
laced with snow
slowly unfurl
a curling tendril
tentative explorer
springwatching

we see you now
the green shoot
and the leaf
this small eruption spitting soil
and breathing free
new bud that holds its secrets tight
a tiny pearl

slowly unfurl
I forced an entry once
an early snatch
the bud deflowered
in hasty touch

the child inside
who pulled away the petals
seeking to preserve the scent
then helpless
as their ripeness turned to soft
and brown decay

slowly unfurl
and loose a tendril
tentative explorer
tenderly entwine
inclining softly

bud and bloom
to friend
or sometime lover

Extract from 'The moveable soul'

My name is Emma, I am 33 years old. I’m married to Simon, to Michael, to David. And, most recently, to Robert. I have four lovers, with two more under consideration. I have never experienced a lesbian encounter, but it’s not something I’d rule out.

I know. You wouldn’t think so to look at me. How many seconds do the experts say it takes to form an opinion? I think it may be as few as fifteen. Don’t judge me too harshly, not until you’ve heard my story. I feel it’s only fair to present you with certain facts up front, and you will interpret them – and me – as you will. But please, not yet.

I have seventeen children, and am currently pregnant with three more. One of my babies died at just seven weeks old; I still mourn him.

I’m 1 metre 63 tall (or five feet five inches in old money) which makes me, I think, completely average. I’m a size 12, size 14 and size 18, and you can guess which one I prefer. My feet have remained constant, at an average size 39.

I think my favourite home is the semi-detached suburban three-bed that Simon and I moved into a year after we married. It’s a modest little house with some truly dreadful 1970s touches still evident even today, but it’s the place where I feel most content, most myself, if that’s possible.

There are other places I call home. My loft apartment in the Docks is a marvel of space and light and modern engineering, but is never a place I want to stay too long. There’s also my four-bed house in the country, with its mellow brick work, fire engine red Aga and ‘room for a pony’, as the saying goes. Not to mention the converted barn (big mistake – much too draughty), the two-bed flat in the tower block and the rather nasty housing association rental in an undesirable area of town, overrun with drunks and pushers, where you’re not safe out of doors after dusk.

I spend a lot of time looking at Google Earth. The whole planet reduced to a single screen, staring back at me from my computer. Zoom in, and here’s the UK. A little closer and my home county fills the screen. Then, here’s my town and here, the street where I live. I can even see the house I share with Simon, with underwear and bedding from circa April 2003 hanging suspended in time and on the washing line in the garden. Zoom slightly further out and my street becomes part of a complex design of lines and curves and oblongs and circles. Roads that cross each other or fork, leading to new roads or a dead end.

When I was younger, I used to think about life as a road, with forks and junctions and crossroads. So many directions leading to so many destinations. So many ‘what ifs’. What if I marry, what if I stay single? Children or no children? A trip to the sea-side or one-way plane ticket to New York, or Sidney, or Addis Ababa? A four-storey town house, a London apartment, a ycardboard box in the subway, a small door in a wall of the room with a cake on the table that says Eat me…

I suppose I thought I could have my cake and eat it, if you’ll pardon the pun. And I didn’t just nibble it around the edges; I swallowed that cake whole, and the lines between truth and fiction, reality and make-believe started to blur, until every life I’ve ever lived felt like a lie.

A taste of Vinney culture

Vinney’s mood is sour and sweet
but mainly sour.
She glowers at barking dogs and hogs
the sofa and remote control,
extolling long-gone shows she moans
there’s nothing on the telly.

Vinney’s room is books and bags
and furs and fags
and ash that freckles dusty frames
of dames and doe-eyed broads on old
billboards in black and white that light
the room like Technicolor.

Garland, Monroe, Betty Grable –
fabled legs insured for better
than a million.
Greta Garbo garbed in white
on opening night, while Bogey and Bacall
give it their all upon the silver screen
and much more off...

Vinney watches ancient flicks
on cut price DVDs and dreams
that she is Audrey Hepburn crooning
of Moon River, smoking cigarettes in movie style
while breakfasting at Tiffany’s.

Word surgery

I read the Word, I read the Word out loud
I asked, Please make your meaning clear,
it hovers in a cloud of gossamer
that algorithm rudely sweeps away.

I held the Word, I held it to my breast
and found to my surprise the Word made flesh
to dwell among us, or at least among the ones
for whom the Word was good.

And it was good, oh yes my children,
it was good. It gave a meaning
to the sentences of life, and turned prosaic thought
to poetry.

But now they cut the Word, they copy and they paste
it to my flesh. The Word is written red
and bloody, jumbled inarticulate
a Babel babble for the age.