You Just Haven't Earned it Yet, Baby

Behind the twilight scarred garden shed
Committed to everything I’d ever read,
Our cola breath tasted of yesterday’s bath water
Lips met as two forks tangling in the kitchen sink.

Rose petals falling from the skies
Never marked that very first kiss,
Dance of adolescence was never slow.
But hey, seaside-girl, shoals of your eyes
Were too beautiful for the town’s shore line.

Furrowing fingers found that wettest clay
Earthed against the smell of creosote and
The first quiffs of Autumn dreaming.
Let me count the ways she taught me
How to h(a)unt the lonely heart.

Fey in flame, depressed drapes, scarecrow shy
One cigarette would burn the school down.
Sneer of Mr Madeley, made me want to epistle
The man who slits throats for a living.

Tomb it may concern,
Litany of fans letters delivered by hearse:
If Saturday ever comes, meet me at the cemetery gates.
I shall be dressed as death, hyacinths strangling my pale neck.

Always seemed to rain at the weekends,
Meekly, my feet never left the house,
Gravely, did she tread hallowed ground alone,
Attached by stems to life-support Walkman?

Soft shuffle of sombre suicide scripts
Stapled schoolboy actors to pages of Wilde plays,
Elvis tears mascara’d Truman’s cold blood.
Diaries tasted of celluloid honey
Wasted words hived poverty into poetry.

Desire for hire with Shropshire naked choir  
Tease to please in Teeside tea shops
Rehearse death in Glaswegian verse.
No Dear Mum, life was never quite sane again.

Rebels without a clue sniffing glue
Beside silent waltzers and rollercoaster,
Cracked lips mouthed Jimmy Dean and Natalie Wood,
In blue vapours, Los Angeles reeled across the pier.
Singing The Smiths until bed broke my dreams.
We could have stuck the stars to the sky.  

If Morrissey had never met Marr
How many would have invented them?
The Mildreds were a once-sung love affair
And yet, they never left my bedroom.

Beware the wrath to come
Wide to receive the chants from streets,
Jealous of youth, Dickensian thieves steal hope.
Bolt lock your heart
Only cry in the dark.

London was a lustrous Lady-in-Waiting
Petticoat thighs in second hand Harrods shoes,
Ghosts left their lives at Euston’s lost luggage,
Empty suitcases would soon become heavy.

Lyrics left on train tracks
For other passengers to behold,
The songs that saved your life
Ripping umbilical c(h)ords unto canal lips.

Once, upon a woman’s body
In lipstick red, scrawled lines between her thighs,
There Morrissey rested until a savage sun’s tongue
Began playing easy to get, to beget
The lady of my pillowed dreams.

Swallow that was drawn on my neck
Never faded - just took flight
To the kneeling bells of now.

We are all sleeping
We do not want to believe,
We are waking inside song
Are we just starting to sing?