Poems fall down with the rain-
dry-sounding drops,
they explode on the skylight, like tiny sandbags;
(you think they sound wet
because you know they are,
not because they do).
Poems slide off my bed with the blankets-
they always slide off the same side:
because they're too heavy,
and cannot be retrieved.

I heard poetry in the pretty feet of a rat
tiptoeing in the night.
Oh, poems are in the dust,
the dust and the silverfish
that glue the brownish pages
of old magazines
stacked on the tea-chest shelves;
I bought them in Shielsy's Bookshop-
he wrapped them in brown paper and string
and I carried them home in the rain
against my chest
like an orphaned lamb with corrugated skin
and egg yolk stains.
The drops of rain
mounted up at the ends of my hair-
they welled like tears.

I have come back to reclaim my poems.
I know a woman who calls them po-ems
and they sound strangely autistic;
I know a man who wears his poems
like a raincoat,
and you wonder what his hands are doing
underneath;
he sits at small round tables outside coffee shops
and busks his thoughtful frown,
his inspired distraction,
like a private-school-kid
with pimples and a cello.
I know a man who wears his poems
like a horse-hair vest;
he flagellates himself with metre and rhyme;
you can count the lashings of the dipthongs,
you can hear him moaning in the night.
I know a woman who irons her poems flat
like a floral overall.

My poems have come home to me-
like neglected children,
they seem to have forgiven me more than most.
Go, then, and kill that fatted calf.