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We spend New Year’s Eve in your dirty flat,
washing down greasy pizza with cans of Foster’s
in silence. Impatient children light firecrackers
outside, and I try to make love to you out of habit.
You want to play computer games instead.
I venture to the bathroom to throw up.
You’re still at the desk at eleven fifty-eight,
fighting Nazis in northern France, rescuing
comrades from the trenches and hurling
hand grenades at advancing Germans. I hug you,
count down the seconds into your ear,
kiss you softly. Happy New Year, darling.
I collapse to the floor through fireworks
blood streams out of my nose; my eye
swells shut in an instant. Happy New Year,
you whisper with a smile, and kick
my barely healed ribs with heavy boots.
Then you return to the front line.
From Fire No 26 (2006)
Vivienne Westwood, a cento
The garment should say: ‘I am this’
A story of itself
It’s just so creative to put a sentence together
Greet me by ‘how lovely you are’ rather than ‘I like your hat’
I haven’t thought properly about dying
But if I were to write anything on my tombstone
It would be ‘The only revolution is culture’
Every time I speak to someone, I assume they understand
How easy it would have been not to lead this life
I could have been a schoolteacher
What you are given for free should not be owned
Love affairs go a long way to helping life pass you by
Behave according to the clothes
Forget yourself and you will become who you are
I am the centre of my look, like Chanel was
Punk was kids having a great time, but for what? I don’t know
If I go into a room and see Pamela Anderson looking incredible
I’m going to be delighted
The sun makes my skin itch when I’m on a bicycle
A nude is never really naked
I know exactly what I would like my legacy to be
Form is always becoming something else
I design for a world that doesn’t exist, you know, one like this but better
When you stand arms warm with froth, all you see
is a wall of stone, the suggestion
of weather, dirty glass. You know your hands
will smell of leftovers, garlic and grease,
something sweet; you will not smell good enough
to eat. When the water and steel has made
you their prisoner, he will stack himself
behind you, close as a knife. He will tell
you he needs you more than food or fortune,
spoon or cup; kiss your neck like the scent
of sunlight. And you will grow fat on the way
he holds your waist, hungry as a dying man.
Until the dirty water empties itself
against the grain in a silver tide
and you can dry your ten pink fingers one
by one; take his hand and show him what
that wooden door in the stone wall is for,
broken glass, how soft the rain is as it falls.
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