20 October 2010

That Night

My bed in white sheets, strewn with jumpers not all mine. Laptop, notebook, neat-angled. Sock-toasties and balled up in pyjama bottoms eating rhubarb pie and reading all my theory and criticism. Go go biro: myth touch history, sift through whatever flotsam washes up.

Then Ted cuts to the quick.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their blood tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

1 comment:

Mike said...

I guess you were being academic, what with notebook and biro, and then, suddenly!
Derailed by an unsatisfactory poem, with very odd imagery. How come a morass (=wet marshland) of emblazon? A bit uneven, that Ted.

You just stick to mocking sonnets using a four-feet line, my girl