You could be forgiven
if you mistook her
for a footstool at first.
Balled in on herself
like a stocking,
she rejects a warm chair
for the circle of rug
right where your feet
ought to go.  Tiny tigress
in nun’s clothing,
she has found a jungle
in the table legs,
and elected herself queen.

You can’t touch her.
Here is a cat from whom
you can coorie no crumb
of human affection.
Lift her –
she’ll put up her paws
like a boxer,
push the soft pads
to your eyelid
with a look that says
‘you know I would.’
She doesn’t blunt her claws
for just anyone,
but she blesses
each clean bedspread
with dust-bath,
sparrow’s blood;
bringer of death.

Little ghost,
she is miraculous
in the dark:
the faint white flash
of her upturned face
the only light
she’ll lend you.

Ode to a Typewriter

I found you drowning:
ditched in a joiner's skip
on the corner of Keir Street,
one flint edge
in a flotsam of joists
and shavings.

I hauled you home --
together we chattered
through the close like children --
your tines skittered
as I swung you under my arm
like a sibling.

In the flat I stuffed you
with foolscap, explored
the loose tooth of every key
like a lover.  You spat back --
scattered my strokes
hot and black on the page.

You're perfect.  My Bakelite baby --
your four-bank alphabet
beats and rebounds,
beats and rebounds like a heart.
We're partners, you and I, in crime --
we keep the neighbours up all night.

Absence

Alone in a kitchen on the corner
of West Port and Bread Street

at rush hour - strippers sharing cigarettes
in the stairwell, and at the window

a skiffle of rain.  The record needle skates,
stutters in the final groove, and the room

foams with static.  I break a plate, almost
on purpose, then pack the naked pieces

in newspaper.  On the table, a snarl
of hard milk in a carton, a cup of coffee

turning stagnant and cold, breadrolls
curled like fists.  I skate your name

in the sideboard's skin of dust, and hope
like all hell you'll come home.

Cadaverine Magazine 2009