Episodes of Modern Life

# The Art of Falling Apart / the Tate Modern

In rooms of cat piss &
Statues of Christ,
She sewed clumps of fur onto
Her dead husband, and
Called it ‘Man, Alive’.

# Supermarket Soliloquy

Beside baked beans & cornflakes
He beseeched ‘The Lord to forgive him.’
An old lady turned down her hearing aid
Unaware of the blood on her mango.

# Lonely.com

3,000 friends on Facebook
He drinks alone at the bar.
Wraps his arms around a cursor
Which just blinks in the dark.

# One of the Questions I Asked the Night?

Where does the light -
Deflected, pearled and pooled –
Condensed and curved, finally rest?

# The Leather Couch

‘Are you still getting erections?’ therapist asked.
‘Bit cheeky,’ I mused,
Tracing her inner thighs with my eyes
To the point where sense sometimes ends.

# Naïve from Birth

Always assumed scissors
Cut paper or hair,
Imagine my surprise
When the barber told me of
The scissor sisters in the flat above.

# Everybody is a Fantasist These Days

I asked him over flat ales
(knowing the answer and his virgin ways)
‘This erotica you write, did it happen?’
‘I’ve seen it,’ he aggressively retorted,
‘In hundreds of porn films.’

# Lipstick Paragraphs and Cocktail Chapters

On her laptop, on trains, on cracked pavement
She failed to finish the story for a decade.
The characters haunted her as
Ghosts in the midnight machine.
Then one walkman morning alone in the park
Cavatina strings strangled pigeons in flight, and
She knew that the story had already finished.