You Spin Me Right Round Baby, Right Round

In the park, the way you grabbed me baby, and your lips, sweet as lemons. How I was spinning, swigging the night away, and baby you whispered songs, as if the trees were listening, the swings, the lampposts with their beer-glazed glow, and oh so many bottle-top crisp-packet moments. You remember, in the leaves, the way you told me I tasted of too many cola cubes or sherbet dips, and we laughed the way people laugh when they are new to each other. It was dizzying, wearing your donkey jacket, my hair backcombed into space and you dancing, dancing on the bandstand as if time might stop if you stayed still. It was almost rollercoaster happy, with the blinking of a strip light from the public loos, and our chattering filling the spaces between the railings.

Picasso’s Mistress as a Jug

He has brush-kissed red cherries onto the round of her hips, dipped his thumb in sea indigo and stroked each inch of her. Her lips barely curve. Her green eyes never blink. She is a perfect replica, a memory of Santander on the only day cloud blighted the sky and his mistress ate cherries in a blue striped chair ignoring him for two hours while he threw colours into his palette and tried to discover what she might have been like when she was younger, before she was with him.

Protect

She holds him as though letting go means losing everything. He is on her shoulder, clinging to her tight-lipped face. Her hand closed around the cup of his back.

They are carved into the day, and she longs for a shift of light, for crowds to disperse and the doors to be locked so they can be themselves again, loosen their mutual grip and rest a while.

He will suckle her stone breast and she will sing a lullaby hoping the cold won’t take him.

Dead Doll

She is not wanted, with her thinning hair and seaweed eyes.

This doll, with her pretty lips pouting, wants to be kissed on her cherry red lips.

I try to help her. I uncover her eyes and listen to see if I can hear her breathing.

Words

He wrote a haiku in the sand. As he finished the last syllable the sea washed it away. “The sea eats words”, he said, and his lover agreed. “It eats words and spits them back out.”

They walked along the edge of the waves, the out-going tide leaving debris of rope, tin cans, driftwood. They poked at the tide-line with sticks searching for words. His words or any other words they could find.

They collected letters in a bucket and spread them on a picnic blanket. “What do these letters spell?” he asked his lover, and they both stared at a mess of vowels and consonants, barnacled and tangled with seaweed.

“This ‘F’ he said is rough as stubble, feel it.” His lover stroked the back of the “F”. He noticed the sand-pressed sweat on his lover’s skin. His lover noticed the freckling on his shoulders, a flush of sun. There was a heated silence. He was playing with a smooth-worn “O” with no doubt in his mind about what “O” stood for. “Come closer”, he said to his lover and he whispered other letters, starting with an “L” then an “O” “V” “E”. His lover added the letter “R” and they smiled.

They spent the rest of the day abandoning letters, losing them in the sand, in their hair, in grass growing behind the dunes.