Last Boyfriend

How should I not be happy
for my first boyfriends?
rare as they were like slivers of beef,
like miner-celebrities, emerging from dreams,
for massaging my battered ego into self esteem;
complementing me on my
Revlon, apricot, sparkly, eye-shadow,
worn frequently in German, and CDT, and even
for the lower set of Maths;
hiding with me under the
large golfing umbrella,
in the rain, on the playing fields;
for the mix tape and the love letter,
and to Theo Boyce especially
for paying for the pizza
at the Pizza Hut, on Granby Street
which was £5.
For not noticing the rolled up wads of loo roll
padding out my optimistic wonder-bra.
For being flawed, or terrible, or irredeemable.
For providing context.
There will be tea, and travel cups, and the colour pink.
The internet. Sunny days.
Spontaneous bunches of flowers
will be bought home from car-parks.
How should I not be happy for my first boyfriends?
And for all of their girlfriends and boyfriends.
And for you, making something from nothing,
reading your paper, in the beer garden on the High Street;
Hungary; books; the colour purple;
dangly earrings; the night-time; summer;
the Fraglerock jigsaw I once won
on a phone in competition;
the environment; buddhism; rain.

My hair, smelling of coconut and satsumas
and falling relentlessly onto the carpet
in the dining room
and onto the sofa
and the parquet in the kitchen
and the tiles
and onto my clothes and woolen shoulders
black jumpers, leggings
to mingle with the cat’s
who is both white and ginger
but who only ever seems to shed the white
hair; waiting to be hoovered,
or brushed, or sticky taped
to death.

My hair is waiting to transubstantiate.
To become the hair of Cindy Crawford,
thick,
fibrous,
rope
like.

Each strand the width of a motorway.
Each strand, endless.
Each strand incapable of falling out, thinning, breaking
ever needing to be hoover-ed up.

My hair is waiting to transubstantiate.
To grow pink. To self -hoover.
To learn to speak in cat tongs.

Air

Cool as
balmy in Summer,

frozen in Winter

with needles

like diamonds

of asbestos.


Smelling of kitty litter

to put it politely.


Indoor heated. Fragrant.

Hibiscus scented.


For Sale; more expensive when surrounded by a

five bed townhouse,

than a two bed end terrace.


Easily explained by a weather diagram.

Colder at one end of the kitchen

than the other.


Easy to hold
in one or two
palms of your
hands.


See through


silky, precious, miraculous,

necessary,


a matter of concern

in a hermetically sealed hostage situation.


Running out of my lungs

when I try to take my
unfamiliar body for a run.


The same in the lungs of my lover

as in the ordinary capillaries

of my worst enemy.

All there is between us.